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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

ESTIMATES

ENGLISH KINGS.

LONDON : PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STEEET SQUAKE
AND pahliament street

ESTIMATES

OF THE

ENGLISH KINGS

FROM WILLIAM 'THE CONQUEROR' TO GEORGE III.

BT
Jf^LANGTON SANFOED,
AUTHOR OF "STUDIES AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP THE 'GREAT REBELLION,'" El'C.

* To be a king and wear a crowii is more glorious to them
that see it than it is pleasure to them that bear it.'
Queen Elizabeth.

LOIJDON :
LONGMANS, GEEEN, AND CO.
1872.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

THE MEMORY

WILLIAM CALDWELL EOSCOE.

PBEFACE.

The ' Estimates,' now published in a collected form,
have appeared at intervals during- the last two years
in the columns of the ' Spectator ' newspaper. They
were undertaken, at the suggestion of the Editors of
that periodical, with the hope that they might assist
in supplying a want which has been felt by many
readers of English History, of some more distinct
conceptions of the English Kings as living men than
are supplied by the incidental notices scattered
through the record of their reigns, or by the meagre
and often incongruous summaries of qualities which
precede or conclude the narrative of each reign.
Though something has been done in this direction
in the case of particular Kings, I am not aware of
any previous attempt having been made, on the plan
here pursued, to present a complete series of personal
delineations of our Princes from the Norman Con
quest. Such delineations are of more significance

viii PEEFAOE.
and value as elements of National history in the
case of England than in that of most countries, in
consequence of the personal ability of the great
majority of our Kings, and the close cooperation of
King and People implied in the Spirit of the English
Constitution. There must be necessarily some appearance of
dogmatism in a work in which conclusions alone
are stated ; so I have endeavoured, wherever space
would allow, to suggest the considerations which led
to the conclusions, or to illustrate the views put
forward by corroborative facts. This was, of course
possible much more in the earlier than in the later
' Estimates ; ' but I do not think that any Estimate
will be found to be simply dogmatic. Though any at
tempt of this kind must as yet be, to a certain extent,
tentative and provisional, the positive judgments here
embodied have not been hastUy formed ; and I have
little expectation that they will be materially modi
fied by future historical investigation. At any rate
their definite exposition will facilitate their correc
tion by other historical students, and so contribute to
form a more settled public judgment.
In availing myself of the best aids afforded by
previous writers, I have not adopted the conclusions
of any without thoroughly considering the grounds

PREFACE. ix
on which they seemed to rest ; and, as a consequence,
I do not think that my view of any King's character
will be found quite identical with that taken by a,ny
preceding writer, though it would imply absurd arro- ¦
gance on my part if a greater or less similarity were
not found in the great majority of the Estimates to
the general tone of the conclusions of some other
writer. A specific enumeration of authorities in a
work of this description is impossible, but I may
mention here a few of the writers to whom I am
under the greatest obligations. Besides older stan
dard historians, such as Hallam, Lingard, and Sharon
Turner, I owe much to Mr. Freeman, Dr. Lappenberg,
Mr. Pearson, Sir E. Creasy, Mr. Froude, Dean Hooke,
Mr. S. E. Gardiner, Lord Macaulay, Lord Stanhope,
Mr. Massey, and (not least) Sir Erskine May. Quite
as much am I indebted to the various editors of the
volumes issued under the authority of the Master of
the Eolls and of the Camden Society : — in particular
to Mr. Walter Shirley, Mr. Hingeston, Mr. Stubbs,
Mr. Eiley, Mr. Nichols, Mr. HalliweU, Mr. Cole, Mr.
James Gairdner, Professor Brewer, and the late Mr.
John Bruce. Other authorities I have referred to in
the ' Estimates ' themselves ; but I must not here omit
Sir H. Nicholas' 'Introduction to the Proceedings
of the Privy Council,' the volume on Tudor Legisla

X PEEFAOE.
tion by the late Mr. Amos, the works of Mr. Luders
and Mr. Tyler on the early life of Henry the Fifth,
and Mr. W. D. Christie's Life of Lord Shaftesbury.
For the reign of Charles the First and the Common
wealth, with which my own studies have made me
most familiar, I have naturally relied more entirely
on my own researches.
The i Estijift.ates ' have been revised throughout,
and a few additions and omissions made which
seemed desirable. ^ - i _A_ »
\ J. L. S.
.1THKN.EUM Club; Augusts, 1872.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
WILLIAM 'THE CONQTJEEOE' . 1
WILLIAM 'EUPUS' . .21
HENRY THE FIEST . 34
STEPHEN AND MATILDA . . 46
HENET THE SECOND . . 57
RICHAED THE PIEST . .71
JOHN . . ..... 84
HENET THE THIRD . ^ . . 93
EDWARD THE EIEST ... . . 103
EDWARD THE SECOND . . . . . 120
EDWARD THE THIED .... 131
RICHAED THE SECOND ... . 145
HENET THE POUETH ... . .156
HENET THE FIFTH • . . 173
HEKET THE SIXTH . • . . 191

CONTENTS.

PAGE

EDWAED THE FOUETH ....

. 204

RICHAED THE THIED ....

. 218

HENET THE SEVENTH ....

. 233

HENET THE EIGHTH ....

. 251

EDWAED THE SIXTH ....

. 270

MAET 

. 2S1

ELIZABETH ...

. 292

JAMES THE PIEST

. 307

CHAELES THE FIEST .

. 327

OLIVER, LOED PEOTECTOE

. 347

RICHAED, LOED PEOTBCTOE .

371

CHAELES THE SECOND .

. 389

JAMBS THE SECOND

. 405

WILLIAM AND MAET

. 417

ANNE 

. 445

GEORGE THE PIEST

. 465

QEOEGE THE SECOND

. 479

QEOEGB THE THIED

. 497

ESTIMATES OF THE
ENGLISH KINGS.
WILLIAM 'THE OONQVEROR.'
There are many peculiar difficulties attending any
attempt to draw the character of a King, but none
greater than that which arises from his isolated
position. This isolation has often been pointed out
as one of the characteristics of Eoyalty, but we doubt
if sufficient allowance has been made for it as an
exceptional element in estimating the mental and
moral calibre of Princes. We acknowledge that
they stand alone, and in a vague manner we re
cognise that this fact ought to some extent to modify
our estimate of their character ; but we fail to make
this modification in our actual estimate, because
we have not sufficiently x-ealised in detail the nature
of this exceptional plea, and therefore are unable
to give effect to it in regard to special points of

2 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
character. We say, in a general manner, that Kings
are not like other men, and that they must not be
judged by exactly the same rules, but we do in fact
judge them, both for good and evil, in much the
same way as ordinary mortals, and the significance of
our vague deprecatory plea is almost entirely lost in
the specific panegyric or deiiunciation which is based
on our common moral experience. I cannot hope in
the liresent series of estimates of Eoyal persons
entirely to remedy this defect in criticism; but,
perhaps, something may be achieved in this direction
by a few preliminary remarks, and by keeping this
peculiarity well in view in exhibiting each of the
distinctive points of character.
A King, then, is removed by his peculiar position.
alike from the support of private friendship, the con
trolling influence of habitual responsibility to the
law, and the habitual safeguard pf authorised
criticism. In his own country he has no fellow, — in
his own family he has no equal, — and among the
Princes of other countries he may find a similarity of
position, but never an identity of interests. There
can be no real reciprocity with him, either in
thought or feeling. If he seek to indulge his
affections, the difference and inadequacy of any
return that can be attempted by their object must
tend to degrade the act to favouritism. If the
feeling displayed is of a. more subdued and intellec
tual type, it cannot escape from the character of

"WILLIAM 'THE CONQUEEOE.' g
patronage. Whether a wrong be resented, in word;
or deed, or passed over with a gentle xebuke or
patient forgiveness, the course adopted can neveri
have a merely personal character and a personal re-;
sponsibility. It will always be more or less a public
act, liable to be judged by other considerations than
those of persona] feelings. The act is always too'
significant, either for good or the reverse. The;
multitude of indifferent and insignificant acts which;
constitute the greatest part of the lives of ordinary;
men cannot exist as such with a King. He has
always a representative and official character. He
cannot act as a private individual, and what is more,
he can never thinJc as such. His whole view of life>
and men is affected by this fact. He always looks'
at other men and at the characteristics of society ah
extra. He cannot accurately appreciate the personal
motives of individuals within that society, or perceive
and estimate the gathering forces of society during
their noiseless formation. Even if his intellect is of
moderate calibre, he estimates generally far better
than any ordinaiy individual the significance and re
lations to the history of the world of the external
features ' of society, and of palpable results. If he
is a man of superior intellect, he may index and
summarise the progress of events, and look forward
towards great ends from far distant premises. He is
not lost in details or led astray by inferior objects.
He is naturally the best critic of society as a whole,
B 2

4 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
and so, as far as its corporate action is concerned, he
has to a great degree a prophetic power as to the
course of events. But, like the philosophers of
social science in modern times, who base everything
in history on statistics and the theory of probabilities,
his prognostications are frequently belied by the
eccentricities of personal character, and the unseen
agencies which are operating within the heart of
society. He is always peculiarly subject to surprises,
and is frequently censured for judicial blindness to
feelings and movements which have never come
within his ken. What he has gained in breadth of
vision by being removed from the internal conflicts
of society, he has lost in the forecasts of coming
events which the daily action of informing opinion
brings to the minds of ordinary members of that
society- If he is enlightened at aU' on such points it
can never be from his own experience, but from the
information of others, and he must always have the
additional task and responsibility of estimating the
value of this information with very imperfect
materials for his judgment. How is the enlightened
warning of the true prophet to be distinguished in
such cases from the interested misrepresentation of
selfish ambition?
Another of the results of this terrible isolation of
Eoyalty is that a King can hardly be otherwise than
selfish, — using the term in its widest and least
invidious sense. Unselfishness is based on sympathy.

WILLIAM 'THE CONUUEEOE.' 5
and his sympathy must be more or less imperfect^
for the difficulty of realising the position and feelings
of others must be in his case vastly increased ; and
self-sacrifice, which is always to some extent involved
in the true act of sympathy, is with him almost
impossible. His position requires him always to
think of himself in the first place, and however not|le
may be the real nature of the man, and however
kindly and generous his natural instincts, the con
ditions of his life must warp his disposition, and
mate him (often quite unconsciously), in however
slight a degree, postpone the feelings of others to his
own wishes and necessities. To judge a man thus
placed as we should other men, and to pass on his
acts the decided and unreserved sentence of con
demnation which would be justly called forth in their
case, is therefore manifestly unjust. There is a
sense, indeed, higher than is conveyed by the vulgar
doctrine of Bight Divine, in which Kings can be only
responsible to God, — for the laws' of justice, as
applicable to other men, cannot fairly be applied to
them ; and it is some confused feeling of this virtual
immunity from ordinary law which has given rise, no
doubt, to the popular superstition as to the divinity
which hedges in a King.
Where the actions of a King are not extreme
either for good or evil, the considerations arising
from these peculiarities of his position must render
any decided opinion on his real character very

6 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
diffictJt. In most cases, however, the balance is- so
much inclined one way or the other, that the allow
ance to be made for his peculiar position will not
affect the general positive result, and we may speak
,with some decision as to the main features of his
character, without incurring much danger of doing
¦injustice either to him or to the truth.
. The special conditions of the life of Kings are, of
course, externally at least, greatly modified by the
differing circumstances of time and place. The
Eastern despot and the absolute and constitutional
jprinces of the West must have, necessarily, inherent
differences of consciousness and corresponding grades
of responsibility. But fundamentally, the same
stern laws of isolation exist with respect to all,
.whenever the position they hold is a permanent one,
and whenever they form part of a distinct Eoyal
caste. So also with respect to the conditions im-
.posed by the successive stages of civilisation, in
.national life. In earlier and ruder times there
inust be less mystery and more self-assertion in the
(Kingly office, and the Eoyal status may be so pre
carious and brief in its tenure that the incidents of
a separate caste may scarcely attach to it, and in
^periods of transition from, one stage of society to
another, when the old foiindations are overthrown
and there has been no time to consolidate the new
•-—where Founders pf dynasties and systems take the

WILLIAM • THE CONQUEEOE.' 7
place of a Eoyal caste and of a traditionary status,
the conditions of this isolation must be materially
affected. But the position of a Founder, or, as the
old lawyers called him, a Conquestor or Conqueror,
while it implies something more and something less
than that of an ordinary hereditary King, does not
imply the non-existence of the social conditions of a
caste. He may have emerged from conditions of- life
differing very widely from those of his new position,
and hewillalways possess on thataccount an immunity
from some at least of the disabilities which enter into
the Eoyal isolation ; but he will also be more pro
foundly impressed by the specialities of his new life, the
.weight and burden of which ¦wiU be doubly felt from
their novelty, and the close bondage of which will
force itself all the more keenly on his perception,
because he must ever be on his guard against any
relaxation of this self-imposed restraint. To pass
into a life of isolation must be more painful than to
be born into and grow up in it, and some of the
characteristics of which we have sj)oken may become
even exaggerated in the actuating feelings of a
Founder. The problem of character is in his case
more complicated and more interesting, but much at
least of the speciality of Eoyalty must enter into the
rationale of its solution. It will, generally be a
strong man who can acquire such a position as that
of the ancestor of a line of Kings ; it must be a still
stronger man who can endure this changed life, and

8 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
preserve through it some stamp, however faint, of
moral greatness ; and such a man, conceding the
worst that has been said against him, was William
THE Bastard, the Founder or Conqueror of the
Anglo-Norman Monarchy. He was not a good man,
and, with all his success, he was not a happy man ;
but he was too great a man to be an absolutely
wicked man, and the awe with which he inspired all
around him was saved from becoming hate by a
mastering consciousness of the presence of something
good in his nature and a suspicion of possible good
in his ultimate purpose. If I can give my readers
any clearer idea of the character of such a man, they
and I may go beyond or differ from his contempo
raries in the minute analysis of his character ; but
we shall certainly not exceed them, or find our
selves at variance with them in their half-avowed
instincts of it as a whole.
The details of the early life of William the
Bastard are wrapped in considerable obscurity, but
the leading points of the story are beyond dispute.
He was the son of Eobert, Duke, or rather Count, of
Normandy, who was the second son of the great-
grandson of the legendary founder of the dukedom
of countship — Hrolfr, Itolf, or Bollo. It is also
certain that he was a base-born child in more than
the ordinary sense of the term. His mother
variously called Harlette, Herleva, or Arlette was
the daughter of a tanner of Falaise. The social

WILLIAM ' THE CONQUEEOE.' 9
impediment in the minds of the great men of
Normandy to the succession of William to his father's
seat could hardly have been the fact of his being-
born out of wedlock, for illegitimacy was not the
exception, but the rule, in the House of EoUo. No
adequate explanation has yet been given of the
intensity of the feeling against William's illegitimacy,
though the position of a tanner was probably pecu
liarly low and socially degrading. We know too little
of the feelings of those times, and of the particulars
of Count Eobert's relations with Harlette, to enable
ug to understand the exact nature of the feeling
outraged by William's succession. But we know
that it was violently and indignantly scornful among-
high and low in the more Teutonic and Norse
portion of his dominions, and that nothing could
have saved the child from destruction but very
skilful management on the part of his guardians;
(backed, perhaps, by a recollection of the personal
popularity of Eobert), the discord and mutual
jealousies among his cousins of the Ducal House
and of the conflicting races of Normandy, and>
perhaps, the general preference among the turbulent
barons for a minority rather than the strong govern
ment of a prince of mature age. WiUiam, then, was
exposed from the first to a storm of social obloquy,,
and deprived of the peculiar prestige and advantages
of the ruling caste, within which he was nevertheless
included, and to whose destiny of solitude he was at

10 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the same time subjected. He was, therefore, from
the first thrown back on personal resources and
•the peculiarities of his own mind. The social ex-
¦communication against which he was always strug
gling placed him to some extent from the first in
what I have endeavoured to explain as the peculiar
.position of a Founder, with the important difference,
.however, that instead of trying to secure his intro^
•duction into the Sovereign caste, he was striving to
prevent his exclusion from it, and that consequently
-the basis of his pretensions was a presumptive status,
¦not an acquired authority. His feelings must have
¦been akin to those of an heir whose legitimate
•succession was imperilled, rather than those of an
aspirant whose claims were disputed. The stain of
his birth may have given him some greater percep
tion of the life of common men than falls to the lot
of purely legitimate princes, but as far as his disposi
tion was affected by it, it would enhance rather than
diminish the caste feeling within him. From the
ffew facts preserved to us, he seems to have led from
his cradle a life of hairbreadth escapes and constant
anxiety. When his strong, skilful hand was first felt
.at the helm, and how he guided the course of the
vessel, is really quite unknown. We find him. first
an almost helpless and hopeless boy, surrounded
with enemies; and next, as a calm, self-assured
ruler, crushing insurrection at home, and not only
.maintaining himself against foreign princes but

WILLIAM 'THE CONQUEEOE.' 11
mating himself respected and dreaded by them. At
Val-es-Dunes he made use of the House of Capet to
crush the insurgent Norse or Teutonic chieftains
of the Cotentin and the old Saxon Shore about
Bayeaux ; and then he beat back and humbled the
French King by employing against him this once
rebellious array. Men seemed to be compelled to do
his will, apart from and even against their own
interests. Nor was it over men of feeble hands and
poor intellects that this ascendancy of William's was
gained. He triumphed over fierce races, who to the
last fretted under his rule, but who were drawn
irresistibly in the wake of his successful career ; and
over strong, self-willed men, who were compelled to
follow him because he made this the only path to
their personal aggrandisement. He never identi
fied his own personal interests with those of any
man or any connection, but he compelled these to
identify themselves with his objects. His attitude
¦was the same in this respect both in Stat© and
Church. The Church served him well in some of
his greatest needs, and it was always a powerful
.political instrument in his hands. He rewarded it
richly, he endeavoured to raise its character, and
aggrandised it, by making its machinery more
(effective for great ends. But even Hildebrand.did
not dare to more than faintly urge on this generous
iSonof the Church, ecclesiastical pretensions which
would have inverted their relative positions, and

12 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
made the Pope the patron instead of the patronised.
He held his dominions from God, and by his own
sword, was the sharp retort of William, and the
great ruler of the Church, before whom the rest
of Catholic Europe had been made to bow in implicit
deference, patiently acquiesced in this curt refusal.
William sought in all directions for wise counsellors
and able agents of his policy, but he never allowed
any one to make himself necessary to his service or
an irremovable support to his throne. The most
dangerous competitor against whom he was ever
pitted was perhaps the strong-hearted and crafty
son of Godwine, yet the battle of Hastings was but
the culmination of a series of intellectual defeats
which he had inflicted on the greatest of the Saxons.
William's claims on the English Crown were of the
most worthless character, and his partisans in
England of the most insignificant value in point of
numbers and infiuence. Harold was little, if at all^
inferior to the Norman as a soldier ; he had a strong
hold on the affections of a considerable portion of
the English nation, and he was certainly preferred
by the great majority in the island to the Norman
invader. Yet William had routeid him thoroughly
in the moral opinion of Europe before he vanquished
him on the battle-field, and the paralysis of the
Anglo-Saxon energies which opened up the con
quest of England to William was due far more to
the skilful manipulation by the Norman of the pre-

WILLIAM 'THE CONQUEEOE.' 13
liminaries of the contest, than to any distraction
of forces caused by a double invasion in the north
and south, or even any divisions of race. Though
there was scarcely ever a Sovereign whose actions
were more strictly personal in their character
than William's, there was no one who managed
more completely to give them an aspect of legal and
social authority. His most violent acts of personal
- revenge and ruthless fury never seem to have struck
his contemporaries in the same light as did the
atrocities of the men among whom he lived. Either
there was a purpose evident to them and not to us
which relieved their revolting features, or the man
himself had become to them an institution rather
than an individual, and they accepted his acts as a
necessity of his and their existence rather than as
an expression of personal motives on his part. The
necessities of his early career had made him an
assertor of order, and the isolation of his own
interests had made him, as respects the mutual
relations of other men, a comparatively impartial
administrator. His long-enduring patience (engen
dered also by his early necessities), and yet his
-uncompromising fierceness in enforcing his ultimate
•decisions, had something of the slowness and sure-
ness of fate, and impressed even the sufferers with
¦only an uncertain sense of oppression. He was
eminently a Founder, for he really laid the founda
tion and shaped the general outline of the 'subsequent

14 ESTIMATES OF THE ElTGLISH KINGS.
sOciaL and political life of England ; but he possessed
the peculiarity of great Founders of never making
himself in outwar'd profession the ultimate source of
these institutions. They professed to be little more
than adaptations of earlier codes to the wants and
necessities of the existing age. Thus he secured
an indefinite amount of traditional authority for
what would otherwise have been criticised with all
the keenness attaching to personal responsibility.
Though- everybody and everything felt the impress of
his personal action and will, he never appeared but
as the promulgator of the legislation of Alfred and
Edward the Confessor. While he never allowed
anything or anybody to interfere with his personal
will or to dispute his personal position, he was
entirely free from the poor vanity of weaker self-
willed men — of parading their personal pretensions
and abilities.
Perhaps, even with our imperfect knowledge, some
mitigating or explanatory points may be discerned
in the worst actions of the Conqueror, which may
redeem them from" the charge of blind fury or
deliberate malignity. Whatever may have been the'
amount of injustice inflicted by him on individuals 
and it would be going very far indeed to assert his-
justice or wisdom in these instances — it is a fact that
not one of those whose cases have met with most'
commiseration and excited most indignation ao-ainst
him can come forward with a clean and unblemished

AVILLIAM ' THE CONQUEEOE.' 15
reputation. There is always a considerable possibi
lity if not of probability that they were in the wrong'
also in the cause for which, they suffered. This may
have been William's good fortune or his policy, but
it must have made all the difference in the estimate
formed by contemporaries of the justice or injustice
of his conduct. Whatever our patriotic sympathies
and our hatred of oppression, it is not easy to pin
one's faith on the probity of such men as Waltheof,
the chiefs of the house of Leofric, or the great
Norman barons who experienced the vengeance or
justice of William. Men talked suspiciously of the
death of Conan of Brittany, but modern criticism'
has thrown great doubt on the imputation that he;
was poisoned by the Norman prince. The atrocious.
cruelties on the inhabitants of Alen9on are quite
indefensible, but were not exceptional cruelties in
those days, and had a strong provocation and pro
bably a political motive. The desolation of the
Northern counties of England was a great crime,
but it was also a political act of defence against
Scandinavia and Scotland, and may imply much less
of conscious malignity and have proceeded from less
cruelty of disposition than we sho-ald at first conceive.
The Northumbrians, rude and wild in their a,cts as
they were, had a vivid and deep-rooted attachment
to a former state of things— an attachment unto
death to a traditionary system quite apart from that
into which the Conqueror was reorganising England;

16 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
and the Northumbrians, though far nobler in them
selves than many other of the opponents whom he
encountered, were destroyed by him because they
were quite incompatible with his ascendancy in
England. There are personal relations which, however
modified by the peculiaY position of Kings, still even
in their case give us a greater insight into the man
than anything else possibly can. A marriage, in
deed, may be a merely conventional form, and the
relations between husband and wife may differ little
from the other ceremonial apparatus of royalty, but
even a King's relations with his children must always
give us some insight into his natural disposition.
If no one is a hero to his own valet, few, if any, can
be altogether mere impersonations of law and will to
their own children. The province of the legislator
stops here, — the arm of the administrator is arrested,
and something of the individual feelings, though
often but little of the intellectual sagacity, of the
man is here made apparent. But we do not care
about a display of intellect here, when that is so
strongly marked in other relations. In an age of
gross dissoluteness, it is now understood that Wil
liam stands unimpugned in the point of conjugal
fidelity. It is also held to be established by evidence
that he was not only fortunate in, but happy with,
his wife, Matnda of Flanders. Of those sons who
alone played any public part, it is known that Eobert,

wlLLiAlVi 'iiiiii (jONQuEEOE.' 17
the eldest, was least the favourite of his father, and
that the affections of the latter were concentrated
on William and Henry. Unlike many strong
fathers, then, he did not prefer the weaker nature in
his sons. But neither can it be said that he was
substantially unjust to that weaker son. Young
Eobert, indeed, rose in rebellion again and again,
on the specious plea that the government of Nor
mandy was kept out of his hands, after it had been,
implicitly at least, promised to him. But no one
will blame William's conduct in this respect who
sees how the character of the vain, frivolous psince
developed itself; and the repeated forgiveness which
he extended to him had much of the contemptuous
pity and forbearance of his treatment of Edgar, the
Anglo-Saxon Etheling, and contrasts with his firm
ness on the main point in which the interest of the
State was concerned.
To conclude — the reserve and suspicion of others
fostered in William by his early trials led him to
keep his thoughts, and plans, and reasons for his
actions within his own breast ; and as he made no
confidants, and explained himself to no one, it is not
surprising that his motives were frequently mis
construed, even where there was a latent feeling that
his administration was not fundamentally unjust.
This makes it almost impossible to harmonise what
contemporary critics assert against him with what
they admit in his favour, and the praise and the
0

18 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
blame seem alike arbitrary. ' Yet, perhaps, with all
this inconsistency, and want of comprehensiveness in
grasp, there has never been a more impressive cha
racter drawn of a conqueror by one of the conquered
than that by the contemporary Anglo-Saxon chroni
cler of William the Bastard ; and modem philosophy,
though it may attempt to solve some of the psycho
logical riddles which it presents, can add nothing
to the reality of its life-like touches. ' If any one
desires to know what kind of man he was,' says the
chronicler, ' or what worship he had, or of how many
lands he was lord, then we will write of him so as
we understood him, who have looked on him, and at
another time sojourned in his Court. The King
William about whom we speak was a very wise man,
and very powerful, more dignified and strong than
any of his predecessors were. He was mild to the
good men who loved God; and over all measure
severe to the men who gainsayed his will. On the
same stead on which God granted him that he might
subdue England, he raised a noble monastery, and
there placed monks, and Avell endowed it. In his
days was the noble monastery at Canterbury built,
and also very many others over all England. The
land was also plentifully supplied with monks, and
they lived their lives after the rule of St. Benedict.
And in his day Christianity was such that every
man who could followed what belonged to his con
dition. He was also very dignified; thrice every

WILLIAM 'THE CONQUEEOE.' 19
year he bare his crown as oft as he was in
England. At Easter he bare it in Winchester; at
Pentecost in Westminster ; at midwinter in Glouces
ter. And there were with him all the great men
over all England, archbishops and suffragan bishops,
abbots and earls, thanes and knights. So was he
also a very rigid and cruel man, so that no one durst
do anything against his will. He had earls in his
bonds, who had acted against his will ; bishops he
cast from their bishoprics, and abbots from their
abbaies, and thanes into prison, and at last he spared
not his own brother, named Odo. . . . Among other
things, is not to be forgotten the good peace that he
made in this land ; so that a man who in himself
was aught might go over his realm with his bosom
full of gold unhurt. Nor durst any man slay another
man, had he done ever so great evU to the other.
He reigned over England, and by his sagacity so
thoroughly surveyed it, that there was not a hide of
land within England that he knew not who had it,
and what it was worth, and afterwards set it in his
writ. . . . Certainly in his time men had great
hardship and very many injuries. Castles he caused
to be made, and poor men to be greatly oppressed.
The King was very rigid, and took from his subjects
many a mark of gold, and more hundred pounds of
silver, which he took by right and with great unright
from his people, for little need. He had fallen into
covetousnesSj and altogether loved greediness. He

20 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
planted a great preserve for deer, and he laid down
laws therewith, that whosoever should slay hart or
hind should be blinded. He forbade the harts and
also the boars to be killed. As greatly did he love
the tall deer as if he were their father. He also
ordained concerning the hares that they should go
free. His great men bewailed it, and the poor men
murmured thereat ; but he was so obdurate that he
recked not of the hatred of them all ; but they must
closely follow the King's wiU, if they would live or
have land or property, or even his peace. Alas !
that any man should be so proud, and raise himself
up, and account himself above all men! May the
Almighty God show mercy to his soul, and grant
him forgiveness of his ' sins ! These things we have
-written concerning him, both good and evil, that
good men may imitate their goodness, and wholly
flee from the evil, and go in the way that leads us to
the kingdom of heaven.'

21

WILLIAM 'BUFUS.'
The sons of a Founder, if more favoured generally
than he was in the starting-part of their career, are
also exposedto some disadvantages. If their position
has been to a great extent made for them, it by no
means follows that the task of retaining it will be an
easy one ; and the comparison with their predecessor
will in most cases be disadvantageously invidious to
their abilities. If it takes three generations to make
a gentleman, it certainly takes quite as long to render
a sovereignty assured. Earely, too, is genius heredi
tary in an immediately succeeding generation, and
even where it is at all equal in amount, it is usually
very dissimilar in character ; the result being that
contemporaries miss the sort of ability to which they
have been accustomed more than they appreciate that
which they have newly acquired. And the circum
stances of the case forbid that the conditions under
which the character and disposition of the Founder
were formed or modifled should be the same with his
successor, even were that character and disposition
originally cast in the same mould. Thus it may be

22 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
possible that had the positions of the father and son
been reversed, the character which developed itself in
each might have been reversed also. In the instance
before us, this could scarcely have been the case, but
there was nevertheless a strong family likeness
between the Conqueror and his second surviving son,
William. This is partially admitted, even by those
(and in the case of William Eufus there is no friendly
exception) who decry him in every other respect.
There was something of the same greatness of stamp
— magnanimity, they phrased it — and of the same
Idngly self-reliance which eminently characterised
the First William. On one occasion, while besieging
his brother Henry in Mont St. Michel, being un
horsed by the bursting of the girths of his saddle, he
exposed himself to great personal danger in securing
it; and when his knights jested with him on the
inadequacy of the motive, 'By the holy face of Lucca,'
he replied, ' one must be able to defend one's own !
It would be shameful to lose it as long as one could
defend it. The Bretons would have bragged prettily
with my saddle!' In another encounter he was
unhorsed by a soldier, who was preparing to strike
him, when William exclaimed, ' Stop, rascal ! I am
the King of England!' The soldiers, overawed,
raised him from the ground, and brought him another
horse. ' Which of you,' he cried, 'struck me down?'
A soldier stood forward, and said, ' It was I : I took
you for a knight, not for the King.' To which

WILLIAM 'EUFUS.' 23
William rejoined, ' By the holy face of Lucca, thou
shalt henceforth be mine, and, entered on my roll,
shalt receive the recompense of praiseworthy bravery.'
When Helie of Maine fell into his hands, William
said to him jestingly, ' I have you, master ! ' To
which Helie haughtily replied, ' You have taken me
by chance ; if I could escape, I know what I would
do.' At this, William, seizing Helie, exclaimed
passionately, ' You scoundrel ! and what would you
do? Begone, depart, fly! I give you leave to do
whatever you can ; and by the holy face of Lucca, if
you should conquer me, I will ask no return for this
favour.' 'Nor,' continues William, the Monk of
Malmesbury, ' did he falsify his word, but immediately
suffered him to escape, rather admiring than following
the fugitive.' Helie was not disarmed by the mag
nanimity of the King. He raised fresh forces, and
pressed hard the siege of the city of Mans. William
was in England, engaged in hunting when the news
reached him. ' Unprepared as he was,' says William
of Malmesbury, ' he turned his horse instantly, and
shaped his journey to the sea. When his nobles
reminded him that it would be necessary to call out
his troops, and put them in array, " I shall see," said
he, " who will follow me. Do you think that I shall
not have people enough ? If I know the temper of
the young men of my kingdom, they will even brave
shipwreck to come to me." In this manner he ar
rived, almost unattended, at the sea-coast. The sky

24 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
at that time was overcast, the wind contrary, and a
tempest swept the surface of the deep. When he
determined to embark directly, the sailors besought
him to wait till the storm should subside and the
wind be favourable. " Why," said William, " I have
never heard of a King perishing by shipwreck ; no,
weigh anchor immediately, and you shall see the
elements conspire to obey me." When the report of
his having crossed the sea reached the besiegers
they hastily retreated.' ' Who,' exclaims William of
Malmesbury, 'could believe this of an unlettered man?
And perhaps there may be some persons, who, from
reading Lucan, may falsely suppose that William
borrowed these examples from Julius Cresar ; but he
had neither inclination nor leisure to attend to
learning; it was rather the innate warmth of his
temper and his conscious valour which prompted him
to such expressions.' After all, notwithstanding the
monk's scorn of his ignorance, the pupil of Lanfranc
may not have quite forgotten his old master's lessons
from the Classics.
Nor was William the Second inferior to his father
in energy and strength of will. The Conqueror must
have known this, or he would scarcely have committed
to his charge the difficult task of sustaining the
ascendancy of his dynasty in England. Normandy he
was obliged by the force of public opinion there to leave
to Eobert, but he doubtless felt that William, with
the resources of England at his back, would ere long

WILLIAM 'EUFUS.' 25
reunite the two principalities. Yet it was no easy
task that he bequeathed to his second son. The
separation of Normandy from England, while it in
flicted a severe blow on the pride of the Normans on
both sides of the Channel, by restoring the indepen
dence of England, made the position of those who
held lands in both countries very difficult and precari
ous. Their allegiance must in any case be a divided
one, and in the probable event of a struggle between
the two brothers, their possessions on one side of the
Channel or the other were sure to be, at first at any
rate, confiscated by him whom they opposed. The
Anglo-Norman barons, too, were very different in.
their status in England, when they lived there as.
foreign conquerors, with homes and resources in a
foreign land, from what they became when they had
to rely on their own resources, and hold their own
as they best could, as one among several rival races
which inhabited the same island, and which might
be balanced or netitralised by a combination of the
others with the Executive. So during nearly the
whole of his reign Eufus had to contend for his life
as well as his throne against incessant conspiracies
of the Norman barons, and it was only by the aid of
the Anglo-Danish population, and by carrying the
war into the Norman home of his rebellious vassals,-
that he was able to maintain himself at all. But he
did so, and not only crushed every rebellion at home
and secured and enlarged his borders m the British

¦26 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
island, but gradually ousted Robert from the posses
sion of Normandy itself, in defiance of the efforts
of the French King and his allies in Anjou and Maine.
The cession of the remainder of the duchy by Eobeit
for a sum of money restored the old state of things
so far that the princiijalities were reunited under one
rule ; but there was the important difference, that it
was now a King of England who had annexed
Normandy, instead of a Duke of Normandy having
¦conquered England. As with his father, neither
king, nor noble, nor race could stand against Eufus's
will. His able brother Henry tried his hand against
him, but failed. His Norman barons found they were
not an essential basis of his authority. His Anglo-
Danish subjects found they were used by the King as
instruments against their common enemies, but had
gained nothing but a restored sense of national dignity.
As a class they were as oppressed and degraded as
ever. The Church shared the fate of the State.
The bishops either became his pliant tools, or were
compelled to abandon the field to him. The Court
of Eome had to conciliate him, and waive its pre
tensions, just as in the case of his father. Here
were strength and energy and success enough, one
would think, to constitute a great prince in the eyes
of his contemporaries. Yet we do not find the idea
¦of greatness attaching itself to the memory of William
Eufus, as it did to that of his father; and though as
much feared and more hated, he was never in the

WILLIAM 'EUFUS.' 27
same manner respected. While, in the case of the
Conqueror, admiration and awe swallowed up hatred,
in the case of Eufus admiration and fear were
absorbed in a loathing antipathy. Considering the
general standard of morals at that time, there is
nothing specifically told of Eufus which can in itself
account for the horror which he seems to have
inspired. We know, indeed, that there was no love
lost between him and the monks, and that the latter
in their chronicles brought out his vices in strong
relief, instead of softening and brightening the
picture, as in their characters of other persons who
were benefactors of the Church. Eufus hated the
monks, and, while lavish of his money, gave the
monasteries little or nothing, and they in return
chronicled his vices in full; but such men as the
Monk of Malmesbury and Ordericus Vitalis were not
wilful calumniators, and they have probably told us
little that is not true, though their account is a
spitefully minute register of evil. William evidently
did inspire them, and most of his contemporaries,
with an overpowering feeling of something transcend-
antly evil. What, then, were the sources of this
peculiar antipathy?
In the first place, the administration of Eufus,
though firm and, as a whole, self-consistent, had all
the character in its specific acts of personal violence
and irregularity. The King could will great ends,
and achieve them as completely as the greatest ad-

28 ESTIM.'\.TES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
ministrator could have done, but he could not act
with sustained dignity. His nature really lacked the
solidity and substance of that of his father. Even a
kingly bearing did not seem to be inherent in him,
but only an occasional or assumed feature. There
was something strange and eccentric in his appear
ance, which might alarm but did not impress men.
He was strongly built, though not tall, and somewhat.
corpulent. To his florid complexion and yellow hair
he is indebted for his epithet of Bufus. His counten
ance was open ; but he ' had different- coloured eyes, .
varying with certain glittering specks,' and he hesi
tated much in speaking, especially when angry. HiS;
strange, staring, yet uncertain expression was aggra
vated by a trick which he had, when abroad or in
public assemblies, of putting on ' a supercilious look,
darting his threatening eye on the bystanders, and
with assumed severity and ferocious voice assailing
such as conversed with him.' While he was thus
playing the stage-tyrant in public, he often lowered
his real dignity in private by another practice. ' At
home and at table with his intimate companions, he
gave loose to levity and to mirth. He was a most
facetious railer at anything he had himself done
amiss, in order that he might thus do away obloquy
and make it matter of jest.' If I am correct in my
conjecture, with a jealous pride in his royal position,
he fretted more than most princes at the isolation
and monotony of royalty. Naturally an insouciant

WILLIAM 'EUFUS.' 29
man of the world, of considerable personal ability,
with a keen sense of the ridiculous and a thorough
contempt for the conventional, strong sensual pas
sions, a craving for unrestrained social intercourse,
and considerable personal vanity, he felt himself
checked at every point by the necessities and
trammels of his royal position, and sought relief for
this unendurable restraint in eccentricity and buf
foonery. How far he was really unlike other men,
and to what extent his opinions and his views really
went, it is impossible to say, for there can be no doubt
that he took pleasure in exaggerating his natural
tendencies, and in outraging and shocking all the pro
prieties of decent society and common-place men.
He wished to give the impression of originality and
independence, but the outside world, both the foolish
and the wise, resented the outrage on their feelings
or the insult to their understanding. With all the
pride of royalty, he was wanting in its reserve and
¦decorum, and society outside resented his intrusion
into the private sphere as a swaggerer and a jester.
His acts lost the prestige and weight of the imper
sonal administrator, and were criticised and resented
as the fancies of an individual. To make up for this
want of inherent authority, he had to call to his aid
an increased amount of severity and violence, and he
threw into this all the peculiarities and eccentricities
of his own character. His acts were often conceived
in the spirit of a King, but they were carried out in

30 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the personal fashion of William Eufus. So, while by
a strong will he generally accomplished his purpose,
he left behind him a sense of outraged law and of
personal injustice.
Closely connected with the preceding peculi3,rity,
and partly explaining and partly explained by it, is
his freedom of thought and speech on points on which
even the present age is nervously sensitive. To say
that William Eufns was an unbeliever in God and
religion would be probably going too far, but he
certainly looked on them in a manner quite different
from all the conventional ideas of the age. I have
little doubt there was much of similar free-thinking
among the great nbbles of his time, but the royal
isolation of William made it possible to realise and
avow these sentiments in a manner which was im
possible for any member of society at large. I have
no doubt he believed thoroughly in the existence and
power of God, — beyond this he probably believed
nothing. He had a thorough hatred and contempt
for all the human apparatus of religion, and was. dis
posed to stand on his own rights as King and Man
even against Deity itself. He acknowledged that he
was responsible to God, if to no one else ; but he had
also a curious feeling of the responsibility of God
Himself to certain paramount rules of justice and
injustice, to which they both owed allegiance. Per
haps he regarded God as his Suzerain, jnat as he
himself was the Suzerain of his great nobles, and

WILLIAM 'EUFU,'^.' 31
they again the immediate lords of their own vassals..
But his Suzerain must not do him wrong, any more
than he ought to do -wrong to that Suzerain. This
may sound very like impiety to many, but to Eufus
it probably really meant something very different,,
though doubtless he took a malicious but foolish
pleasure in enunciating it in the most offensive form,.
in order to horrify both clerk and layman. He looked
upon virtue or abstinence from vice as a sort of feudal
aid due by him to God as his Suzerain, and to be
withheld if he had cause of grievance against Him,
and had renounced temporarily his allegiance, as it
was to be evaded as much as possible in the ordinary
state of things. When during a severe illness he was
led through the fear of death to choose an Arch
bishop, he chose the one who appeared to be forced
on him by the hand of God, and whom he regarded
as the nominee of his irresistible Suzerain ; but he
resented the necessity and the imposition all the
same, and when the danger was over, and the zealous
but injudicious Archbishop urged on him to live more
in conformity with the will of God, his strange creed
broke forth in the startling rejoinder, — 'Hear, Bishop,
by the holy face of Lucca, the Lord shall flnd no good
one in me for all the evil He has inflicted on me ! ''
After this we read without surprise that William said
(in jest, the pious monk of Malmesbury tried to be
lieve), that if the Jews mastered the Christian Bishops
in open argument he would become one of their sect.

32 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
f The question, therefore,' continues the chronicler,
¦^ was agitated with much apprehension on the part of
the bishops and clergy, fearful through pious anxiety
for the Christian faith. From this contest, however,
the Jews reaped nothing but confusion ; though they
used repeatedly to boast that they were vanquished
not by argument, but by power.'
A man who could talk thus of God, and could act
thus with regard to the Jews, might well inspire a
peculiar horror in clergy and laymen alike. Cer-
tainlj-, however, if he chose to convert his illness and
the consequent choice of Anselm as Archbishop of
Canterbury into an act of oppression on the part of
the Almighty, the King had some reason in the years
that followed to deplore his constrained act. No
greater act of penance and mortification of the spirit
could he have inflicted on himself than he did in
making such a man his yokefellow in the govern
ment of England. Anselm himself compared their
coupling to that of a wild and untamed ox with a
meek and powerless sheep ; but the King could have
told a different story as to the inoffensiveness of the
gentler animal. Any good man always at his side to
admonish him must have been an annoyance to such
a man as Eufus, but there is no good adviser so
irritating as a mild and conscientious ecclesiastic,
with a strong sense of his duty, an equally strong
faculty of persistence and as little amount of delicacy
and tact. He is too good and well-disposed a man

WILLIAM 'EUFUS.' 33
to be treated as an enemy ; he is too mUd a man to
be repulsed with violence ; he is too impersonal and
representative a man to be quarrelled with as other
men; he is a priest, and therefore thinks himself
entitled to lay down the rule of right and wrong ;
he is an officer of the Church, and therefore cannot
believe himself to be mistaken. Never is the cause
of virtue and right in greater peril than in such
hands. In dealing with such a man vice may become
only a form of self-assertion, and virtue an abnegation
of self-respect and a badge of slavery. Such a
monitor might provoke a saint; he wOl scarcely
convert a sinner. And so William, the pupil of the
statesman Lanfranc, became worse and worse under
the spiritual admonitions of the priest Anselm, and
the repulsion to his precepts outlasted the presence
of the preceptor. Anselm retired to the Continent,
in despair or exhaustion, from his long contest
against both the vices and the laws of England ; but
William continued to sink lower and lower in morality
and self-respect, till an arrow in the New Forest — by
whom or wherefore aimed has never been ascertained
— ^put an end to the career of the strong-willed son of
the Conqueror, who, in the words of the chronicler,
' feared God but little — man not at all.'

34

HENBY THE FIB8T.
If the praise of friendly monks is a true certiflcate
of goodness and greatness, there can be no question
as to the character of Henry the First. Their panegyric
is as absolute as in the case of his brother Eufus
their condemnation is downright. The Anglo-Saxon
chronicler, whose sympathies are divided between
the common people and the Church, sums up the
character of King Henry in the following emphatic
words : ' A good man he was, and there was great
awe of him. No man dared misdo against another
in his time. He made peace for man and beast.
Whoso bore his burthen of gold and silver, no man
dared say to him aught but good.' The Monk of
Malmesbury is more discriminating in his praise,
but not less decided. ' He was active,' he says, ' in
providing what would be beneficial to his empire;
firm in defending it ; abstinent from war, as far as
he could with honour, but when he had determined
no longer to forbear, a most severe requiter of
mjuries, dissipating every opposing danger by the
energy of his courage ; constant in enmity or in affec-

HENEY THE FIEST. 35
tion towards all ; giving too much indulgence to the
tide of anger in the one, gratifying his royal magna
nimity in the other ; depressing his enemies, indeed,
even to despair, and exalting his friends and de
pendents to an enviable condition. For philosophy
propounds this to be the first or greatest concern of
a good King, —
To spare the suppliant, but beat do-wu the proud.
Inflexible in the administration of justice, he ruled
the people with moderation, the nobility with con
descension. Seeking after robbers and counterfeiters
with the greatest diligence, and punishing them
when discovered, neither was he by any means
negligent in matters of lesser importance. ... In
the beginning of his reign, that he might awe ¦ the
delinquents by the terror of example, he was
most inclined to punish by deprivation of limb ;
afterwards by mulct. Thus, in consequence of the
rectitude of his conduct, as is natural to men, he was
venerated by the nobility, and beloved by the com
mon people. . . . Nor, indeed, was he ever singled
out for the attack of treachery, by reason of the
rebellion of any of his nobles, through means of his
attendants, except once. . . . With this exception,
secure during his whole life, the minds of all were
restrained by fear, their conversation by regard for
him. He was of middle stature, exceeding the di
minutive, but exceeded by the very tall ; his hair was
1,2

36 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
black, but scanty near the forehead ; his eyes mildly
bright ; his chest brawny ; his body fleshy ; he was
facetious in proper season, nor did multiplicity of
business cause him to be less pleasant when he
mixed in society. Not prone to personal combat, he
verifled the saying of Scipio Africanus, ' My mother
bore me a commander, not a soldier ; ' wherefore he
was inferior in wisdom to no King of modern time,
and as I may almost say, he clearly surpassed all his
predecessors in England, and preferred contending
by counsel rather than by the sword. If he could,
he conquered without bloodshed ; if it was unavoid
able, with as little as possible. He was free during
his whole life from impure desires, for as we have
learned from those who were well informed, he was
led by female blandishments, not for the gratiflcation
of an intimacy, but for the sake of issue .... in
this respect the master of his natural inclin3,tions,
not the passive slave of lust. He was plain in his
diet, rather satisfying the calls of hunger than sur
feiting himself by variety of deliQacies. He never
drank but to allay thirst ; execrating the least
departure from temperance, both in himself and
in those about him. . . . His eloquence was rather
unpremeditated than laboure'd; not rapid, but de
liberate. His piety towards God is laudable, for
he built monasteries in England and in Normandy.'
Henry of Huntingdon, writing towards the close of
the reign of Stephen, gives us an impartial summary

HENEY THE FIEST. 37
of the public opinion respecting King Henry at his
¦death, and a plausible explanation of the change
which subsequent events wrought in this estimate.
' On the death of the great King Henry, his cha
racter was freely canvassed by the people, as is
usual after men are dead. Some contended that he
was eminently distinguished for three brilliant gifts.
These were, — great sagacity, for his counsels were
profound, his foresight keen, and his eloquence com
manding ; success in war, for, besides other splendid
achievements, he was victorious over the King of
France ; and wealth, in which he fixr surpassed all
his predecessors. Others, however taking a different
view, attributed to him three gross vices, — avarice,
as, though his wealth was great, in imitation of his
progenitors he impoverished the people by taxes
and exactions, entangling them in the toils of
informers ; cruelty, in that he plucked out the eyes
of his prisoner, the Earl of Mortain, in his captivity,
though the horrid deed was unknown until death
revealed the King's secrets ; and they mentioned
other instances of which I will say nothing; and
wantonness, for, like Solomon, he was perpetually
enslaved by female seductions. Such remarks were
freely bruited abroad. But in the troublesome times
which succeeded from the atrocities of the Normans,
whatever King Henry had done, either despotically
or in the regular exercise of his royal authority,
appeared, in comparison, most excellent.'

38 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
When, with these contemporary estimates before
our eyes, we approach the consideration of the
character of Henry, one of the flrst things which will
strike us is that caution, the quality which in the
Conqueror blended with and controlled his naturally
flerce and flery temper, was in his youngest son
exalted into the leading characteristic, to which aU
other considerations, however influential in their
various degrees, gave place. This was indeed the
very backbone running through the whole of Henry's
character, and to which every- part of it had some
reference. His mind was one of considerable breadth,
and his caution ranged through every grade of the
quality, from the wisest foresight and painful self-
denial down to actual physical and moral timidity,
and was exemplified in corresponding varieties of
policy, from sagacious watchfulness and well-timed
action down to low and deceitful cunning. This
predominating characteristic led to curious incon
sistencies in his conduct. Not only the necessities
of his early career and actual position, but the
consciousness of possessing greater mental gifts, and
deeper insight into men than most of those among
whom he lived, should have tended to make him
self-reliant and self-assured. Yet, on the other
hand, his very foresight and intuition as to men and
human contingencies made him ever, under the
impulse of the over-ruling feeling, anxious to excess
as to possibilities, and self-distrustful as to his

HENEY THE FIEST. 39
chances of realising his wishes. He conceived great
ideas and, in the m-ain, adhered to them ; he did not
shrink from encountering any difficulties or any
adversaries in the execution of his plans; but he
exaggerated the greatness and importance of probable
difficulties and dangers, and of possible opponents,
and took unnecessary trouble to meet the one and
conciliate the other. He was afraid even to give his
own deliberate and cherished policy full develojpment,
and often took refuge in a compromise or subterfuge
when he might have achieved great results and a
greater reputation by a bolder course. Just as his
contemporaries noticed that he avoided as much as
possible direct conflicts in war, so in policy he rarely,
if it were possible to escape from so doing, met his
opponents fairly front to front, even where success
was tolerably assured. He preferred to break the
line of opposition by some adroit flank movement,
some entire change in the disposition of his forces,
some abandonment of direct principle, in order to
secure indirectly and in another way a decided
practical gain, however limited. He was too wise
and resolute in the main to be other than a strong
and successful ruler ; he was too prudent to attain to
the highest type of statesmanship, of which a wise
audacity is one of the constituent elements.
The tortuous means to which his over-subtle
caution often led him to resort sometimes endangered
the success of some of his most cherished projects.

40 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
For a considerable time the little county of Anjou
had exercised an influence on European affairs quite
out of proportion to its size and natural resources.
Of the family which governed it, and to the remark
able abilities of successive members of which it owed
this anomalous position of greatness, I shall have
more to say hereafter. It is enough at present to
observe that they impressed with equal apprehension
of their rising influence the great Conqueror, the
fearless Eufus, and the calculating Henry. All alike
sought to disarm their hostility by conciliation
rather than force, though the Conqueror at least
never shrank from a violent collision with them
when absolutely necessary. But on the mind of
Henry the importance of making friends of the
Angevin rulers was ever present as a paramount
consideration. He saw quite as clearly as his father
had done that as long as Normandy and Anjou could
be pitted against each other the French King could
contend with the Anglo-Norman princes at consider
able advantage, and preserve his ascendancy in the
northern part of France. He determined, therefore,
that the two principalities should be united under
one rule. The idea was, indeed, to some extent
forced upon him by circumstances. His nephew,
young William of Normandy, the son of the
dispossessed and imprisoned Duke Eobert, had
(through the influence of the French King) succeeded
in obtaining a promise of the hand of Matilda,

HENEY THE FIEST. 41
daughter of Fulk, Count of Anjou, with Maine as a
portion. Henry, alarmed, succeeded by his constant
agent, gold, not only in stopping the approaching
marriage by an ecclesiastical declaration against it
on the ground of too great consanguinity between
the parties, but also in getting his own son William
affianced to the disappointed bride, with Maine as an
immediate possession, and the promise of Anjou
being hereafter added. But the death of young
William of England baffled this skilful though
unprincipled act of diplomacy, and Henry set to work
to reweave his political meshes. His own daughter,
Matilda, had been married when a child to the
Emperor Henry Y. of Germany, and had now
returned to her father a childless widow, past the
flower of her youth. The barons of England had
been much averse to the German match, from
general dislike of a foreigner, and from fear of an
invasion of their estates by a host of new foreign
adventurers. They therefore made it a condition of
their solemn recognition of the succession of Matilda
to her father's crown, that she should not be
married again to a foreign prince without their
consent. This was but reasonable, and had Henry
fairly put before them his newly-formed scheme of
marrying Matilda to Geoffrey, the heir of Anjou, a
boy of fifteen, he might have experienced some
difficulty in overcoming their opposition, owing to
their jealousy of Angevin favouritism, but the risk of

42 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
a marriage with some more powerful foreign prince
would probably ere long have reconciled them to the
project. But Henry, as usual, cautiously appre
hensive, over-rated this immediate opposition, and
resolved rather to over-reach them, and the pledge
thus given was followed by the news of the accom
plishment of the Angevin marriage. The anger of
the barons was great, though they dared not show it
openly, but they used it as a pretext after the death
of Henry to refuse allegiance to his daughter ; and
Henry's over-finessing almost brought on the
catastrophe if not of a final separation of Normandy
as well as Anjou from the English Crown, at any
rate of the lasting exclusion of his own descendants
from the latter. In the meantime, he reaped a.
bitter harvest of trouble and anxiety, owing to the
quarrels and temporary separation of the ill-assorted
and loveless couple. Perhaps this over-caution had
something to do also with the more unpleasing side
of Henry's character, his cold-blooded cruelties.
His two predecessors were both cruel men, but in
Eufus, at any rate, this ferocity was relieved by
impulsive acts of generous magnanimity. But we
find no such highminded forgiveness in Henry. He
felt injuries too keenly, and feared their repetition
too nervously, to be able (except out of policy) to
exhibit generosity to his enemies. We do not lay
any stress on the character of the punishments
which he inflicted, because, however barbarous, they

HENEY THE FIEST. 43
were very common in those days ; but what are we
to think of the pitiless rancour of his conduct
towards Luc de la Barre-en-Ouche, a knight who
had satirised Henry in songs, and whom (althoiigh
he was not his vassal, and in spite of the entreaties
of the Earl of Flanders) he caused to be blinded, the
unfortunate satirist dashing out his own brains in
agony during the process. This was not merely
cruelty, but pusillanimity. All that can be said for
Henry is that he probably felt the satire much more
keenly than an unlettered man would have done, and
that he abused the power of a King to aA'-engfe
the animosity of a student. For Henry was by
nature and early training a statesman of the closet,
and the hatred of such is often more deadly and
implacable than that of men in whom incessant
action leaves no time for brooding over wrongs.
With defects such as the preceding Henry could
not have achieved and maintained the great position
which he actually secured, if he had not possessed
great and commanding abilities. Those quiet,
intelligent eyes, which penetrated through the
surface of men and things, held England and
Normandy alike in stern control. Though he seemed
ordinarily of gentle mood, except when roused to
occasional outbursts of ancestral rage, men feared his
smiles even more than they did his expressed anger,
for they said that he often smiled most on those
whose ruin he was meditating. By force and by

44 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
guile he crushed and kept under him his turbulent
barons, creating a counterpoise to them in men of
low extraction, sometimes drawn from the English
soil, sometimes from foreign lands ; and though his
police administration of England may have lacked
the incessant vigilance and completeness of that of
his father, it was not wanting in vigour or purpose.
During a large part of his reign, indeed, as we
gather from the frequent complaints of the friendly
Anglo-Saxon chronicler, he rather neglected the
internal condition of England in his absorption in
Continental affairs. His administrative genius had
not the ubiquity of his father's. But when he was
to some extent relieved from the anxiety on the
•other side of the Channel, he set himself energetically
to work to realise the promises which he had held
forth in charters at the beginning of his reign, and
evei-y part of the kingdom, and every branch of the
government, local as well as imperial, felt the firm
touch of his well-directed hand. Men complained,
indeed, that he executed the innocent along with the
.guilty, but it is certain that the idea of an irresistible,
presiding executive was re-established in England,
and local oppression in many cases sank into a mere
memory, lingering about the mouldering castles of
the dispossessed nobles. The scholar who could not
forgive a satire could be a liberal and discerning
patron of learning and genius. Another standard of
merit besides that of military prowess and strength

HENEY THE FIEST. 45
of arm and limb was set up in the land; and'
ecclesiastics became less famous as churchmen than
as men of arts and letters. Ecclesiastical preten
sions were kept at bay and temporised with ; never
practically admitted. Here the student- king encoun
tered the student- priest, and the result was a drawn
battle. Anselm, who, in horror or despair of Eufus,
had quitted the arena, was first invited back,
caressed, cajoled, and used as an instrument of the-
King's plans and necessities. Then, when the
demands of the priest became too exacting, he was
threatened and forced into a second exile ; then
again plied with all the devices of a subtle diplomacj^,
until the Church and Eome itself were won from his
side. And lastly, the Archbishop was compelled to
submit to a crafty compromise, which gave up half
the points in dispute to the ecclesiastic, but left all
the power to the King, robbing the partial victory of
all its pleasure to the restored exile, who was then
again caressed and soothed into reluctant quiescence
and comparative insignificance.
Such was the wise, calculating, anxious, unloved
and unloving Henry Beauclerc, the Student-King,
who feared men not a little, but who made all men-
fear him stiU more.

46

STEPHEN AND MATILDA.
If I were seeking for an illustration of that peculi
arity in Eoyalty which sets it apart in the public
eye from other conditions of life, and fences it in
with something of a feeling of sanctity, I could
find none more apt for m.y purpose than the case of
Stephen of Blois, who, with many of the qualities
Avhich are especially kingly, and with others to
which few kings have attained, never succeeded in
impressing the mind of the nation with the stamp of
a king. Brave he was, even to rashness ; and he
was not only a good soldier, but a skilful general.
He had the quick military eye, and prompt military
decision. His energy was exhaustless. Wherever
opposition raised itself, or danger threatened, he
flew like the wind, constantly taking his enemies by
surprise, disconcerting elaborate combinations and
calculations, and crushing half-executed designs. His
perseverance was indomitable, and combined with
an elastic spirit supported him through every phase
of fortune. He was chivalrous to an extent which
marked him out most favourably among the feudal

STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 47
warriors of that age. The chroniclers who are most
attached to the cause of his rival frankly admit his
great generosity to his enemies, and the kindliness
of his disposition. He carried this so far as to
supply the pecuniary necessities of his young rival,
Henry of Anjou, without seeking a single advantage
in return when he appealed to his chivalry, during
an unsuccessful invasion of England. To have
ceased to oppose him, or to be at his mercy, was
with him a sure recommendation to forgiveness, or
to humane and noble treatment. He was courteous
and affable to all men, even to an excess of conde
scension. He had a bright spirit, a genial disposition,
and a kindly, if not a warm heart. In short, he was
a perfect gentleman of the Continental rather than
the Anglo-Norman type, with something in him, too
(notwithstanding the imputations on his sincerity),
which left the conviction of genuine sympathy and
real good intentions towards all men. If the fidelity
of men could have been secured by an infinite
succession of satisfactory personal interviews, he
would have retained, as he won for the moment,
every heart to his side. If tranquillity in a kingdom
could have been insured by prompt personal repres
sion of overt acts of rebellion against his executive,
Stephen would never have been wanting in this
respect. If the example of personal abstinence from
tyranny and cruelty could have inspired the barons
of England with some sense of justice and humanity.

48 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
and the common people with an idea of property
and of order, Stephen's character would have been
an excellent substitute for an exact execution of the
best laws of Edward the Confessor. But it was not
so. Stephen approached the ideal of a knight sans
peur et sans reproche, but the men around him, and
the society of which he was the nominal guardian,
were very little affected by the fact. He was never
felt to be a King, and no effort on his part could
make him either feel or act as a King. When he
became a prisoner in the hands of his enemies, many
lamented his imprisonment and demanded the release
of their dear lord ; but no one seems to have felt the
inadequacy of the proposed exchange for him of
Eobert, Earl of Gloucester, except Eobert himself,
the son of a king, though base-born. With all his
high qualities, he had nothing of the ' awful majesty
of kings ; ' his influence and authority were alike
strictly personal, and he was always thrown back
on his own personal resources. He had nothing of
the caste feeling of Eoyalty, though his bearing was
so naturally courteous that it was almost royal.
But it was always courtesy to the individual man,
not to the member of a class. His social bearing
resolved itself into an inflnite number of personal
relations, within that society of which he was a
member, not the external Head ; and his energies
were dissipated and lost amidst a crowd of separate
and special transactions. He tried to know and he

STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 49
tried to govern every individual baron, and he met
every revolt and encountered every danger as it
arose. But he had no conception of either the
general interests or the aggregate prejudices of
classes as such, and he neglected the means for
securing permanently the one, while he frequently
outraged the other. He looked on men as indivi
duals, and not as Barons or Churchmen, and his
relations with them had never the weight and
authority of Imperial State action. He corrected as
he best could special evils as they rose, but he made
no general provisions which might guard against
their recurrence. He had great force of character,
but no grasp of mind, and no foresight. He could
not generalise, and he spent his life and wore out
his body in a fruitless struggle with details. Never
under an energetic and well-intentioned prince had
the Executive authority been so ignored throughout
England, or the overseeing protection of the State
been so nearly a dead letter. Every man fought for
his own hand, and the weakest went to the wall. A
thousand different centres of authority were set up
in the civil life of the country, and in most cases
these were but so many impersonations of evil.
The King's name, indeed, was not odious in the
eyes of the people, but it was no longer a tower
of strength and of protection against oppression.
It was even worse, for it was a cover to oppression,
Stephen not only relied for his government on his

(50 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
personal relations with men, but he was singularly
deficient in knowledge of men and in penetration
into character. The very invariableness of his gentle
courtesy to all men was perhaps in some measure
connected -with this, for he had not the depth of
character which, as in the instance of Henry the
First, would enable him to wear a smooth counte
nance to those whose inherent villainy had been
revealed to his penetration. Stephen was courteous
to all, partly because he trusted all, or, at any rate,
could not distrust them at that moment. The
charges against him of insincerity and non-fulfilment
of his fair promises may really have arisen from
mere excess of temporary good feeling, and prodiga
lity of good intentions, which were based on a purely
imaginary estimate of the individual, and could
never be realised, in the stern necessities of the
future. I do not think that any charge of wilful
deceit and treachery has been fairly brought home to
Stephen. This want of penetration into personal
character, however, placed the King at the mercy of
every false friend and every designing villain. More
than half the advantages he gained by his energy
and military skill he lost by listening to unwise or
-treacherous counsels, and by impolitic leniency.
But for this, Bristol, the heart of the revolt, would
have soon fallen into his hands, and but for this,
Matilda herself would have become his prisoner, and
every noble in England have been made to respect

STEPHEN AND M.4.TILDA. .51
.and obey him. And this unfortunate choice of
advisers, and misplaced confidence in men, did not
only affect his own interests and reputation most
prejudicially, but also lay at the root of much of the
misery of the kingdom. Not merely had the King
to incur the burden of odium attaching to the mis
doings of his ministers and advisers, but the people
themselves were handed over to the irresponsible
mercies of the worst and most tyrannical men. I
do not believe that Stephen ever wilfully and con-
-sciously placed a tyrannical oppressor in power over
any part of his dominions ; but his want of insight
into character, combined with an easy and careless
disposition, injured not only his own interests, but
those also of other people. He had continually to
conciliate enemies (as he did not choose to crush
them), and he forgot, that it is one thing to pardon
an offence against oneself, and another to place
others at the mercy of the pardoned offender. So,
without intending it, and through sheer careless
kindliness to individuals, he unwittingly handed
over half his subjects to a doom of intolerable
oppression. That, under all these drawbacks, Stephen should
have been, as he certainly was, a popular king, is a
striking testimony to his personal character. The
people at large had, as we have seen, heavy com
plaints which they might justly urge against his
thoughtless neglect of their interests. The barons,

52 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH , KINGS.
if they profited frequently by his weakness, had,
along with the people, a common cause of complaint
against him in the foreign mercenaries (chiefly
Flemings) on whom he lavished the gold accumula
tions of Henry the First, and whose services he
thought preferable to those, of his Anglo-Norman
vassals. These men, though not more covetous and
rapacious than other adventurers, had no time given
them, owing to the nearly incessant demand on then-
services in the field, to acquire the character of
settled inhabitants of the country, and the unmixed
feeling which they thus inspired of a merely mer
cenary army, without bonds of sympathy with the
soil and the native population, made them hateful to
all classes of Englishmen. The Church, towards
which the King had no special antipathy, like his
predecessor Eufus, felt itself outraged in the persons
of its leading ecclesiastics, whom the King treated
as if they were mere laymen, and on whom he was
sometimes (for him) unusually severe, because they
offered to him a corporate instead of an individual
resistance. He could not understand caste obstir
nacy and disobedience, and when brought face to
face with it he lost his usual kindly forbearance
exactly where, for his own interests, it was most
needed. Yet, with aU these grievances against him,
there was a general disposition in all classes to like
and to sympathise with him. When he was in
captivity, the cry for his release arose alike from

STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 53
layman and cleric, from high and low, from friends
and opponents, and her obstinacy on this point
•diverted more than any other thing the hearts of the
nation from Matilda. The Londoners, whOj protected
by customs and officers of their own, and living more
closely in his immediate presence, had no cause to
dread the great nobles, and saw little but the favour
able side of the King's character, were devoted to
him, and contributed largely to his money-bags and
militia ; while the men of Kent, also more protected
against feudal usurpation than other parts of Eng
land, rallied round his wife when all England besides
had apparently forsaken him. A sovereign who
could enlist such sympathies on his side could not
have been a bad man, or an entirely weak man.
He was a kind but not infatuated father, and a
faithful husband to one of the noblest women of the
age. But he was no king; he was only the first
and the best of the barons.
For estimating the character of his rival, Matilda,
or, as she is better known, ' the Empress Maud,' we
have far fewer materials, and my- conclusions must
therefore be much less positive, and may be, to some
extent, unjust. Most of her life was passed out of
England, and English chroniclers seem to have in
terested themselves wonderfully little in the pecu
liarities of her character. By birth half-Norman,
half- Saxon, she seems to have combined the hard
and proud character of the one with the stubborn

54' ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
obstinacy of the other. She had undaunted courage,
and a masculine spirit of enterprise, with a mascu
line sternness of mind. Whatever there may have
been in her of the gentle and the womanly seems to
have been suppressed by the circumstances of her
early life. Betrothed in her eighth year, and sent
to be educated in Germany, where she became the
wife of an Emperor when she had scarcely passed
her twelfth birthday, she naturally grew up in the
ideas of the land of her husband, and in all the stiff
restraints of an Imperial position. We know that
the impression which she left behind her in her'
Imperial home was not an unfavourable one, and
that nobles of Lorraine and Lombardy (the seat of
her Imperial dower-lands) followed her on her return
to the Court of her father, claiming her back as
their chosen ruler. We can well conceive that her
stately, haughty bearing, and her proud self-depen
dence would suit well the headship of that elaborate
hierarchy of dignities which called itself the suc
cessor of the Empire of the West. But ' it was a
difficult thing for one who had sat by the side of
the successor of Charlemagne, first to sink into a'
little Countess of Anjou, and then to drive a dis
advantageous bargain for her father's crown with a
rebellious and lawless nobility. If the pride of the
Empress Dowager and of the woman were severely
wounded by the forced marriage with a petty count
and a clever, precocious stripling, with a will of his

STEPHEN AND MATILDA. 55'
own, quite as much must the haughty spirit of the
daughter of Henry and the granddaughter of the
Conqueror have chafed under the necessity of per
petual conciliation and concession towards the barons
of her own party in England. That she was a
woman of some power of mind we might gather, if
only from the influence which she is stated to have
exercised over her father's counsels on an important
point, such as the choice of the noble gaoler for
Duke Eobert. But she came to England with
Imperial ideas and a wounded spirit, and both alike
disabled her from ruling this country. She looked
down with indifferent contempt on aU ranks of
society alike. If Stephen was merely one unit in
the social mass, she was so removed from it that she
scarcely recognised its existence. The Londoners
complained bitterly of her insolent treatment of their
great citizens when they besought her to lighten her
heavy demands on their purses. But they had no
reason to complain of being worse handled than
others. She treated the barons, who, abandoning
Stephen's cause, sought her favour, with the ill-
concealed scorn fitting for renegades, but most
impolitic in one who benefited by their recreancy.
She seemed to ignore the influence and counsels
even of her half-brother Eobert of Gloucester, to
whom she was chiefly indebted for her crown ; while
the proud, intriguing Bishop of Winchester retreated
to his diocese, feeling himself for the flrst time in

56 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
his career counted as of no weight. Even if she had
been forewarned of her approaching downfall, the
probability is that she would have preferred a brief
reign of independent royalty to long years as a puppet
sovereign. She had but one rule with friend and
foe — she kept them all at a distance. With an
undisputed title to the position she held, she might
have been tolerated and respected ; as a competitor
for the crown, she merely alienated everybody ; and
when her son was recognised by the King of France
as Duke of Normandy, and again by the united
English factions as the adopted son and successor
of Stephen, her own prior claims were passed over,
and were virtually negatived. The very reverse of
her rival, she lost all by being a King overmuch,
and nothing but a King.

67

HENBY THE SECOND.
With the accession of the House of Anjou to the
throne of England, we feel at once that we are on
new ground, and that, though there is a certain
continuity, both in the history of the country and in
the character of the reigning sovereigns before and
after that event, there is also a marked change in
the one and a fresh element in the other. If, as I
believe, infusions of new blood into families never
destroy and seldom seriously diminish the force of
existing eleriients of character/and though sometimes
modifying the character as a whole by their co
existence, more frequently manifest themselves from
time to time as an additional type of character in
individual members of the family, alternatingj
according to some unknown law, with the 'old
elements, it is especiaUy important to ascertain what
this new blood really is, as this knowledge will be
one essential key to character for the succeeding
history of the family. The House of Anjou, according
to the family legend, had its origin during the
Carlovingian period of French history in one Ingelgar,

58 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
raised to the dignity of Count by Charles the Bald,
or his son, Louis the Stammerer, some time in the
latter half of the ninth century. This Ingelgar, we
are further told, was the son of one TertuUus, a
peasant (raised by Charles to the rank of Seneschal),
who was the son of Torquatius (corruptly called
Tortulfus), a Eoinan settler, whose family had been
expelled from Armorica by order of the Emperor
Maximus. We attach no authority to the legend,'
which may be entirely unfounded, but we can, I think,
recognise in the family type of the Counts of Anjou ¦
some characteristics which are Italian rather than '
Teutonic or Celtic. Strong men they nearly aU of
them were, and wise men also in their generation.
Learned far beyond the average of their age, one of
them was himself the author of a fragment on
Angevin history, which is described as of considerable
merit, and another is the reputed author of the
proverb that an unlettered king is but a crowned ass.
Courageous when needful, but never unnecessarily ¦
courageous, they were good soldiers, but better
statesmen. Hot-blooded by nature, but patient by
policy. Generally very prudent, but always very
pertinacious. Not too proud to crouch for a time in
order to gain an ulterior end, but too proud ever to
forget the indignity, and with only too good a
memory of the' past. Capable of unscrupulous
cruelty, but averse to wanton brutality. Often kind-
hearted and habitually courteous, but not always-

HENEY THE SECOND. 59
ti-ustworthy. Often true and reliable in a wider
sense and in the essence of the matter, but seldom
scrupulous as to immediate promises or acts. With
little or no Mth, but a great deal of superstition ;
readily submitting to do penance for the evil means
employed, but holding fast to the iU-gotten gain.
Perfect actors, but not wholly untrue men.
Henry the Second of England, the representative-
of this line of Counts, partook of these family
characteristics, though his Anglo-Norman descent
was not wanting in its counterbalancing influences.
Seldom has a general moral estimate formed of a
character respecting whose leading points there is so
little dispute varied so much among historians as in
his case. His contemporaries range in their verdicts^
from the strongest praise to the deepest reprobation,
and modern writers, if less unreserved in their
language, are no less marked in their general tone.
The great question involved in the Church contro
versy between him and Becket has, no doubt, had
considerable effect in causing this divergence of
sympathies, but apart from this, his nature was as
complex as those of Stephen and Matilda seem to be
simple and manifest ; and there is so much of what
appears to be inconsistent and antagonistic in both.
the good and evU points of his character, that men
have naturaUy judged very differently about what
they could scarcely understand.
Henry of Anjou was, beyond dispute, a real King.

¦60 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
He could not only govern, but he could make his
position as King distinctly felt throughout the
nation. There was no question about paying respect
to his authority. The Executive in his hands was a
reality, and he himself was the hinge on which
English society hung. His character, if it was
considerably affected by external circumstances,
was powerful enough to impress its own stamp
most decidedly on all around. Under its influence
England ceased to be a mere cock-pit for rival barons
and a disorganized social chaos. The idea of order
and law once more predominated, and the Executive
was again their vindicator and guardian. To effeci
this some strong efforts of physical force had to be
anade, and some questionable acts of authority were
resorted to. A Eoyal army swept through the
kingdom, capturing and destroying the strongholds
of the most turbulent or dangerous nobles, and it is
said that the King dared to proclaim the resumption
to the Crowii of all grants since the death of Henry I.
But these special acts of aggressive vigour were less
influential agents in ushering in the new era of
assured tranquillity than the constant and habitual
presence of a watchful and provident administrative
system. To whatever extent our judicial system
owes its present shape to the sagacity of Henry of
Anjou, it seems certain that (however slow and
imperfect his process might be) he brought the
safeguard and criterion of law closer to every

HENEY THE SECOND. 6-1
inhabitant of England. The chroniclers tell us that
he loved to depress and humiliate the proud nobles,
and to raise up men from nothing ; and that he was
jealous of the talents and influence of no men, sp
long as their power was derived from himself
ultimately. He felt that any doubt as to where the
ultimate authority rested was fatal to confidence and
sustained order. His expedition in person to Ireland
¦was dictated by something of this feeling, and had he
not been drawn away prematurely from that scene by
domestic disturbances, he would probably have in
augurated a system of government in the island very
different indeed from the anarchical despotisms,
feudal and patriarchal, which sowed the seeds of
Ireland's future misery and degradation. These are
characteristics of a great and strong administrator,
and to some extent of a great legislator. But the
highest legislative faculty implies also an amount of
originality of conception for which we can scarcely
give Henry II. credit. He had a great knowledge of
the ideas of others, and of the results of ideas and
systems in past times, and under every variety of
circumstances. Contemporaries who knew him well
personaUy, and who were competent judges, tell us
that he had a remarkable knowledge of history, and
was continuaUy accumulating facts, and discussing
questions of interest with the ablest men he could
find; whUe his astonishing memory prevented his
ever losing anything he thus acquired. He studied

¦62 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the past for the lessons of the past, and he studied
the events and the men of his own age in order to be
able to use them as elements in forming his judgment
of measures and of policy. He seems to have had
little instinctive insight into men, but he made up to
some extent for this deficiency by close observation.
He never, it is said, forgot a face on which he had
once steadily gazed. He had the learned and literary
tastes of his family, inherited both from his Angevin
ancestors, and from his student-grandfather, Henry
Beauclerc. He was an accomplished master of the
spoken languages of Europe, and whatever knowledge
•of men and the art of government could be acquired
through the medium of study and personal intercourse
and observation, he gained, and was ever gaining.
He had a clear, sound judgment, and (in matters of
policy) a cool head. But he had but little initiative,
and avowedly often waited for the further development
of events to determine his action. He thought long,
that when the occasion offered he might act promptly
and decisively, and he never ventured a step further
-than the necessities of his position or his policy
seemed to demand.
The impetuous and impulsive natives of his South
ern Continental dominions could not understand this,
to their minds, want of enterprise in their new ruler.
They were obliged by the force of facts to admit that
he could acquire and retain, by a judicious mixture
of armed force and subtle policy, the whole western

ilJiJNlii Till!; BKUOND. , 63
«ea-board of France, from the confines of Flanders to
the Pyrenees. But they could not understand how a
man who could gain so much could calmly stop
short at this point, and not proceed immediately to
grasp more, and to expel the House of Capet
altogether from the soil of France;— and so the
Troubadours in their lays reproached him for what
they • thought a want of courage and a spirit of
nnworthy concession. They did not understand the
character of a man who, working out a carefully-
conceived policy through the agency of passing
opportunities, could make long pauses, and give
ground even for the time, awaiting patiently fresh
occasions for the further development of that policy.
The desultory, purposeless warfare, of which he was
a spectator in the early years of his life, had
¦evidently made a deep impression on his mind ; and
bold enough when he saw that the road was one
which he must take in order to arrive at an im
portant end, he felt no temptation to indulge in
border raids, or to enter on rash enterprises which
could not be sustained.
Like his grandfather, Beauclerc, Henry was very
cautious, but his caution formed part of his pre
meditated plans ; he did not reaUy hesitate or recede,
but paused or stopped short, because he had never
intended to do more. The very fact that he based
his action on accumulated experience, and regulated
it by close and continuous observation of the course

64 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of events, guarded him to a great extent from ens-
gaging in enterprises beyond his strength, and from
the consequent mortification of an unforeseen check.
Had he been more original in his ideas he might
have been less uniformly successful. This peculiarity
of disposition or policy led him generally to avoid
war as much as possible, and to have recourse iri
preference to diplomacy, or, at any rate, delay. As
a statesman he distrusted the uncertainty of appeals
to arms, and as a political student his nature revolted
from the coarse and brutal character of this mode of
decision. He was not naturally a soldier or a,
general. He was curiously economical of life, and it
was said he regretted the dead far more than he
appreciated or rewarded the living ; that he bitterly
bewailed the loss of those to whom in their lifetime
he had been only a hard and exacting master.
Their slaughter was so much loss of material. War,,
with its blind fury, menaces indiscriminately the
lives of the best men and the least efficient ; and,
Death, whUe obliterating, often for the first time
appraises them at their just value.
A policy so mature in its conception, and so
measured in its execution, we might well suppose to*
have been the symbol and reflection of a tranquil,
passionless, well-ordered nature in its author. But
this was not the case, and here begin the curious
contradictions in the character of Henry. His
temperament was not passionless, but fuU of com-i

HENEY THE SECOND. 65
pressed passion ; his mind was not tranquil and non
chalant, but seethed with the restrained excitement
of expectation. We have a very minute account
of his personal appearance and habits from those
who were often admitted to his inmost circle, and
the picture is a most curious one. He was a man of
middle* height, broad-chested, and with sinewy arms,
rather inclined to be corpulent. His head was large
and round. His complexion was reddish and freckled,
his eyes greyish-blue, and his voice unmodulated.
He was very abstemious in his diet, and his only
sensual excesses lay in another direction. Giraldus
Cambrensis, however, tells us that he preserved
some external decorum even in these, until after his
wife's misconduct in abetting the rebeUions of his
sons. But one great feature in his habits was his
restlessness. He was scarcely ever stUl. He took
the most violent and prolonged exercise on horse
back, hunting or hawking. When he returned
home he seldom sat down, but continued either
walking or standing. During this time he was
either reading or maintaining a conversation with
his ' clerks ' on deep and intricate subjects. He was
affable and unconstrained in his demeanour, and had
great flow and power of speech. He had his pleasant
jest, without losing his dignity. Parsimonious in
his private capacity, in his public he was lavish and
magnificent. His extreme restlessness, which appears
to ^have made a great impression on observers, was
p

66 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
by some attributed to a desire to guard against his
tendency to corpulency ; but it was not an artificial
-device, but a physical necessity. It was thus that
he gave some vent and relief to that eager, impatient
spirit, which fretted under the delays imposed by his
own well-weighed and deliberate policy, and it was
thus that by constant physical exertion or absotbing
intellectual exercise he reduced within the limits of
control his heated rebellious blood. But there were
times when the fetters in which he bound his spirit
were snapped asunder, and when the whole Southern
nature of the man burst forth, terrifying aU around
him. It is one thing to wait patiently for the long-
defeiTod realisation of a deeply-cherished plan, it is
another to see it suddenly overthrown by some
unforeseen and irreparable catastrophe. Henry could
not bear such disappointment, and this character
istic affected in an unfavourable manner his morality
as well as his personal demeanour. He had the
character of a most untruthful man. The King
of France declared to his ambassadors that the
English King was so full of fraud and deceit, so
regardless of his word and covenant, that it was
impossible to put faith in him ; and a Cardinal,
after a long conversation with him, said, ' Never did
I witness this man's equal in lying.' Lying was not
the exception among great men in those times, a.nd
Henry's lying is explained in one respect by Giraldus
by the very plausible hypothesis' that he thought it

HENEY THE SECOND. 67
better to repent of what he said than of what he did,
and to fail in his word rather than miscarry in his
act. He could not sacrifice an elaborate plan to
truth ; and the same cause which produced his
insincerity and faithlessness also broke through his
reserve, and revealed his genuine physical tempera
ment. He became, we are told, a very ' lion, and
more ferocious tha.n a lion.' His eyes rolled wildly
a,nd became blood-shot, his face was inflamed, he
poured forth a torrent of abuse and imprecations,
and assailed with his hands all within his reach.
When, on one of these occasions, a page presented a
letter, the King attempted to tear out his eyes, and
the boy did not escape without severe scars. On
another, when a favourite minister ventured to
justify the conduct of the King of Scots, Henry
called him a traitor, threw down his cap, ungirt his
sword, tore off his clothes, puUed the sUk coverlet
from his couch, and, throwing himself on the ground,
gnawed the straw on the floor. This demonstrative
passion was neither English nor Norman, and it
gives us an increased opinion of the general power
of self-control which could enable a man with such a
temperament to be the prudent and sagacious states
man that Henry was.
There were other characteristics of his Angevin
ancestors in the English King. Like them he had
no faith, but he had superstition. We are told that
he paid no attention to the ordinary religious observ-
F 2

68 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
ances of the Church ; he refused to listen to clerical
admonitions on his moral conduct, and he had no
scruple in appropriating or retaining in his hands
Church revenues, or in simoniacal transactions with
respect to Church preferments. He was at one time,
at any rate, curiously scrupulous as to his oath of
fealty to his feudal Suzerain, the King of France ; but
he cared little about oaths in general, holding, it is
said, one particular form of oath alone as inviolable.
In his contest with Becket there was a curious alter
nation of royal dignity, persistent determination,
and harsh violence, with abject submissions, sudden
changes in temper and policy, and most degiading
and superstitious penances. Attracted by his talents,
he had raised the man originally fram a subordinate
position to the Chancellorship, and assured, as he
thought, by his seeming subserviency and coarse
jovial ways, against the reproduction of an Anselm
in his person, he made him Archbishop. But here
his observation had not compensated for his want of
penetration into character. Becket became his most
dangerous opponent, appearing in the new character
of the demagogue priest. Henry tried to concUiate,
and then to cow him into submission. When Becket
recanted his recantation, he drove him and his family
from the kingdom with harsh violence. Then he
suddenly changed his game, and lured him back to
England by an absolute and abject submission ; and
when this strong appeal to Becket's old feelings of
friendship (on which Henry had so much counted as

HENEY THE SECOND. 69
an agent in the ultimate realisation of his own views,
and which was not altogether insincere, so far as the
feelings themselves were concerned) failed in restrain
ing Becket from an arrogant and inconsiderate parade
and abuse of his temporary triumph, the passion of
the King broke forth, and he uttered the fatal words
which brought on the murder of the Archbishop.
Finally, when, although he had disarmed the anger
of the Church by earnest disclaimers of the author
ship of the crime, fortune seemed to have suddenly
deserted him in all his enterprises, his superstition
effected what his principles had failed to do. Not
content with making the fullest pecuniary atonement,
he hurried to Canterbury, and subjected himself to the
most ascetic penances at the Archbishop's tomb.
The penance seemed to work, for the flrst news after
it which greeted him was the unexpected capture of
the King of Scots ; and Henry, relieved in conscience,
and a man seemingly pardoned by Heaven, proceeded
once more with renewed spirit to undo the work of
the martyr whom he had just acknowledged as a
saint, and to consolidate and extend those 'Con
stitutions of Clarendon,' to his opposition to which
the Archbishop had virtually sacriflced his life !
For, a true Angevin, though Henry crouched, he
gave up no spoils.
Historians are divided as to his capability of for
giving offences. The probability is, that as he never
abandoned a friend, he also never forgot an injury,
though he did not often think it worth his while to

70 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
be unforgiving. He could often frankly ignore the
past, but in some cases he could neither forget nor
forgive. He had much to forgive in his own domes
tic circle, and the cause of his misunderstandings
with his sons has been matter of much speculation.
Giraldus, however, tells us that though an over-,
indulgent parent to them when young children, he
was a sfep-father, making no allowances for them,
when they grew up. This is not an uncommon
parental feature, and seems to arise from an excessive
pleasure in the helplessness and necessary dependence
and trustfulness of the young child, and in disap
pointment and distrust at the rising independence
and alien interests of the growing youth. In Henry's
case it led to the flnal catastrophe of his life. All
his sons had disappointed and defled him, but he
still clung to the idea of the loyal devotion of the
youngest, about whom his loving delusions as to his
young children still lingered. But when, in the very
agony of his humiliation before his eldest surviving
son, and his hereditary enemy, Philip of France, the
name of ' Earl John ' appeared at the head of the list
of rebellious barons whom he was required to pardon,
the heart of the Father and of the King broke at
the same moment, and he bade farewell to the world
and to policy, and, in the bitter despair of his whole
nature, cursing all his legitimate sons, died refusing
to recall that curse, attended and consoled only by the
untiring affection of one base-born child.

BIGHABD THE FIBST.
In one respect, if in no other, Eichard Cceur de Lion
has experienced the same fortune as his father.
Both are among the most bepraised and best abused
Kings in history, and in each instance in the
estimates for evil and for good there is a considerable
foundation of truth. Neither of them, though
stained with not a few crimes, can be pronounced
justly an absolutely bad man ; and, on the other
hand, each of them, though endowed with command
ing qualities, leaves on the mind a certain impression
of incompleteness. As the statesmanship of Henry,
so the personal ascendancy of Eichard stopped short
of that impressive grandeur which marked the
character of the Conqueror, and of one at least of
their own descendants. Yet the nature of Eichard
of Aquitaine or Poitou, as he was for some time
called, was not poor, purposeless, and fickle, as some
modem historians, following too implicitly the state
ments of his enemies, have depicted it ; and if less
complex and less interesting as a study of character
than that of his father, it is sufficiently unusual to
be worthy of more than passing attention.

72 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
That modern writers should have been led to
adopt this error of the earlier chroniclers respecting
Eichard has probably arisen from a previous false
conception on their own part of his character as a
whole, owing to the delusive position in which that
prince presents himself to our eyes in the early part
of his career. He was called ' of Aquitaine,' which
was handed over to his rule, and he appears before
us as the favourite son of his mother, the heiress of
Southern France, and as the especial hero of the
Troubadours of that old land of the Celtiberians, the
Eomans, and the Visi-Goths. He was not only the
companion-in-arms of the Knights of Aquitaine, but
was himself a poet- warrior, after the true Proven
cal fashion. Historians have, therefore, naturally
enough, leapt to the conclusion that he derived his
nature as well as the fashion of his life from this
fiery, impulsive, southern population, and have drawn
his character on the assumption that such was its
essential structure. Arriving at this conclusion,
they have adopted without much investigation those
statements respecting his personal characteristics
which seemed to harmonise with this general con
ception. But I cannot but think that although the
outward fashion of his education and early training
were doubtless derived from tlie lands south of the
Loire, and though he himself spoke and wrote his
Sirventes in the soft Langue d'Oc, the main outlines
of his organisation were derived from a very differ-

EICHAED THE FIEST. 73
ent source. His analogues are to be found rather in
the pages of the Eddas and Sagas of the North, and
it was as a Scandinavian Yiking that he thought
and acted. I do not deny that this Scandinavian
type may have been modified in some of its com
ponent parts, as well as in its outward garb, by the
blood which he derived from Eleanor of Aquitaine ;
but while I cannot reconcUe the leading features of
Eichard's character with the Aquitanian type, I do
recognise in them most distinctly some of the most
striking traits of those Scandinavian rovers from
whom, through his Norman ancestors, he more
remotely sprang. There was the commanding pre
sence which overawed opposition, and seemed to
stamp him as a natural leader of men ; there was the
chivalrous yet somewhat stern courtesy ; there was
the uncompromising pride; there was the adventurous
spirit in which the love of fame and the lawless greed
of acquisition seemed to be blended in almost equal
proportions; there was the devotion to a great
purpose of an enthusiast, often distracted for the
moment by the temptation of immediate adventure
and gain, but using even these distractions as new
instruments in its further prosecution ; there was
the thirst for battle, and the delight in the mere
physical contest, befitting a wild animal rather than
an intelligent being, and yet the common sense and
shrewdness of perception which could see the limits
of acquisition and of fame, and could turn away

74' ESTIM.4TES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
from fruitless laurels. This was the character of-
those men who made a home for themselves in the
Neustria of the Franks, and who established .Norman
rule in Southern Italy and Sicily — and such was the
essential foundation of the character of Eichard
Lion Heart. Tall above the middle height, but
more remarkable for his broad chest, and stirong yet
pliant sinews, he was by general coniession.physically
the strongest of living men, as he was alsophysicaUy
the most inaccessible to fear and the most self-
confident in his strength. On one occasion, putting:
to sea with a handful of followers, he hastened to
•the relief of Joppa, into which town the Turks had
already forced their way, and were assailing' the:
remnants of the Christian garrison. After a hasty
reconnoitre, Eichard drove his vessel on shore, and
raising his fierce war-cry, plunged into the midst of
the masses of the enemy, and drove them out of the
place. On the next day, while encamping with a.
few hundred horsemen outside the gates,. he was
suddenly assailed by thousands of the Turks.
Driving back the foremost assailants, he himself
clove a Turk's head down to the shoulders, and then
rode along the enemy's front line, crying, ' Now,.
who will dare to fight for the honour of God?'
Years after the close of the Crusade, the Turkish
mothers threatened their children with ' Kino-
Eichard is; coming ! ' and the riders asked their
shying horses, ' if they saw the Lion-hearted King.'

EICHAED THE FIEST. 75
His mental and moral constitution seemed as if they-
had been assimilated to, or almost as if they were
the developments of, this physical force. He was a
magnificent animal, even in his spiritual aspect.
He was savage when roused to anger, and cruel, as.
much perhaps from the natural indifference to
suffering in itself or others of a powerful physique
as from conscious malice ; but placable when the
exciting cause was removed, and capable of a
strong-hearted masculine mercy much resembling-
that displayed on occasions by Eufus, with whom
one modern writer has fancied a resemblance in the
character of his vices. The story of his conduct tO'
the archer whose arrow caused his death, if not true
in itself, at any rate represents what it was con
sidered Eichard was capable of, and reads very
lUce the stories already related of the strange Eed
King. 'He ordered,' says Eoger de Hoveden,
'Bertram de Gurdun, who had wounded him, to^
come into his presence, and said to him, "What-
harm have I done to you that you have killed me ? "
On which he made answer, " You slew my father and-
my two brothers with your own hand, and you had
intended now to kill me ; therefore, take any revenge
on me that you may think fit, for I will readily
endure the greatest torments you can devise, so long-
as you have met with your end, after having inflicted
evils so many and so great upon the world." On
this the King ordered him to be released, and said.

76 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
" I forgive you my death." But the youth stood
before the feet of the King, and with scowling
features and undaunted neck did his courage demand
the sword. The King was aware that punishment
was wished for, and that pardon was dreaded.
" Live on," he said, " although thou art unwiUing,
and by my bounty behold the light of day. To the
conquered faction now let there be bright hopes, and
the example of myself" And then, after being
released from his chains, he was allowed to depart,
and the King ordered one hundred shillings of
English money to be given him.' But if Eichard
was not implacable or cruel, he was a very stern
man in his bearing even when not roused to anger,
and there seems to have been a gravity in his nature
from which we might have expected far greater
results than any which were achieved. Giraldus, in
drawing a comparison between him and his elder
brother Henry, points directly to this cast of cha
racter. 'In force and largeness of mind,' he says,
' they were pretty much on a level, but their way of
excelling was very different. The one [Henry] was
praiseworthy for his mildness and liberality ; the
other remarkable for his severity and stability. The
one was to be commended for his sweetness, the
other for his gravity ; the one gained credit for his
easy disposition, the other for his constancy; the
one was conspicuous for his mercy, the other for his
justice ; the one was the refuge of the unfortunate

EICHAED THE FIEST. 77
ill-deserving, the other was their scourge ; the one
was the shield of evil, the other its hammer ; the
one was devoted to the game of War, the other to
its serious part ; the one to strangers, the other to
his own circle ; the one to all men, the other to
good men.' No one will deny that here we have
attributed to Eichard a weight of character which
is very inconsistent with the mere knight-errantry
which is generally associated with his name. But
though he was not an empty-headed trifler, the
patient statesmanship of his father, Henry, formed
no part of the endowments of Eichard. He was a
great general and a great engineer ; could not only
fight, but plan campaigns, and was a master of the
science of war. By his strength of purpose and
military abilities he not only maintained his footing
in France, but threatened the very existence of the
Parisian crown. One or two great feats of provi
dent statesmanship, such as his alliance with the
Court of Eome, and the purchase by his gold of the
position of King of the Eomans for his nephew
Otho, attest the existence of talents of a still higher
order. But his naturally frank and overbearing
nature revolted alike from the subtleties and the
condescensions of diplomacy, and was, indeed, in
capable of either appreciating or employing them.
He had a power of quick observation, and a fairly
good judgment; he listened to good advisers, and
»he relied for the rest on the ascendancy and force of

78 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
his personal character, and his established reputation
as a strong and faithful friend and a dangerous enemy.
He was not, indeed (as has been generally supposed),
wanting in a sense of his responsibilities as a ruler.
He was very seldom in England, in person, it is true,
and he left his kingdom to pursue what seems to us
a wild and unnecessary enterprise ; but he made the
best provision he could for the administration of this
¦country during his absence. He placed at the head
-of the Government as Chancellor a man who, what
ever may be alleged against him by his enemies, and
however unfortunate his career, added to remarkable
abilities a strength of will which for some time
-sustained that stability in the executive which the
absence of the King was so calculated to impair.
He made his brother. Earl John, and his half-brother,
Archbishop Geoffrey, take an oath not to enter
England for three years, and he tried to stay their
¦ambition and bind them to the observance of this
engagement by loading them with dignities and
wealth. He kept a watchful eye on English pditics
-during his absence, and his long stay in Sicily,
which has been considered a blot on his character as
a zealous Crusader, was probably dictated by a dread
of impending civil war in England. The great
officers of State and Justice who succeeded Long-
champ were men of character and ability, and not-
withst-anding the King's absence and the treason
of Earl John, the kingdom really reiaained to a

EICHAED THE. FIEST. 79
great degree under the safeguard of an effective
executive. Nor can Eichard be accused of want of
foresight with respect to the interests of his Con
tinental possessions, when Philip of Franbe, from
whose ambition they were most exposed to danger,
was his companion to the Holy Land. But had he
believed that all would have been lost during his
absence, though Eichard's steps might have lingered,
they would scarcely have been arrested, so confldent
was he in his power of retrieving everything, and so
strong in him was the spirit of the Crusader. The
Crusades, indeed, gave exactly the appropriate vent
to his adventurous spirit. There was a great cause,
that of God Himself, at stake, and Eichard was a
devoiit believer. The indistinctness of the horizon
which lay before him added an imaginative zest to
the enterprise, while the concrete possibilities of
wealth and royalties in the conquered East awakened
the covetous side of his character. He was lavish
and magnificent in his expenditure, and the whole
Crusade lived on his accumulated wealth for many
months ; but he did not lose sight of contingent
advantages, and the conquest of Cyprus was valued
perhaps even more as the acquisition of a satrapy
than as a base of military operations, or a trophy of
his warlike fame.
Eichard was not only devout, by which means he
conciliated the clergy, but he had the superstition of
the Angevins. Although his sensual intrigues do

80 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
not intrude themselves on the page of history like
those of his father, he was, by his own confession,
addicted to gross indulgences. Twice before his
death we hear of his sudden fits of remorse and
penance for these excesses, and the account is a
very curious one. 'Having called together,' says
Eoger de Hoveden, ' all the Archbishops and Bishops
who were with him at Messina, in the chapel
of Eeginald de Moyac, he fell naked at their feet,
and did not hesitate to confess to God in their
presence the filthiness of his life. . . . He received
the penance imposed by the Bishops before named,
and from that hour forward became a man who
feared God, and left what was evil and did what
was good.' This good conduct was not, however,
of a permanent character, for we read in the same
chronicler, under the year 1195, " In the same year
there came a hermit to King Eichard, and preaching
the word of eternal salvation to him,' warned him
to ¦• abstain from what is unlawful,' saying, ' if
thou dost not, a vengeance worthy of God shall
overtake thee.' The King, however, ' despised the
person of the adviser,' and the hermit went his
way. But ' on the Lord's Day, in Easter week ....
the Lord scourged the King with a severe attack of
illness, so that, calling before him religious men, he
was not ashamed to confess the guiltiness of his
life ; and after receiving absolution, took back his
wife, whom for a long time he had discarded, and

EICHAED THE FIEST. 81
putting away all illicit intercourse, he remained
constant to his wife, and they two became one flesh.'
His last recorded penitence was on his death-bed ;
but before the Bishop could move him on this occa
sion, he had to encounter a sally of grim wit on the
part of the dying man, which again reminds us of
Eufus. When persuaded of the truth of his im
pending death, Eichard asked what he was to do.
' Consider of disposing of thy daughters in marriage,
and do penance,' replied the prelate. ' This confirms
what I said before,' said the King, 'that you are
jesting with me, for you know that I have never had
either daughters or sons.' ' Of a truth, 0 King ! '
rejoined the Bishop, ' you have three daughters, and
have had and nourished them long; for as your
first-bor.n daughter you have Pride, as your second
Covetousness, as your third. Self-indulgence, — these
you have had, and have loved out of all reason from
your very youth.' ' True it is,' said the King, ' that
I have had these, and thus it is that I will bestow
them in marriage. My first-born. Pride, I give to
the Templars, who are swollen with insolence, and
puffed up beyond all others. My second, that is
Covetousness, I give to the Grey Friars, who with
their covetousness molest all their neighbours, like
mad devils. My last, however, namely. Self-indul
gence, I make over to the Black Friars, who devoiir
roast meat and fried, and are never satiated.' ' For,'

82 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
adds William de Hemingburgh, in explanation, 'these
three sorts of men the King hated.'
The Bishop and the King were certainly both
correct in their enumeration of Eichard's cherished
faults. By his arrogance he lost half the advantages
which his acknowledged ascendancy among the
princes of Europe would have secured to hiin. On
this point historians of all nations, English, French,
and German, are agreed. He could not conceal his
sense of his own superiority, and he could not con
ceal his opinion of the contemptible character of
others; and this fact in itself disqualified him for
excellence in statesmanship, and gave to his rival,
Philip of France, an advantage which was not the
due of any substantial superiority of mind. Cove
tousness, too, was, as I have said, one of Eichard's
undoubted faUings, and to it he owes some of the
greatest stains on his memory, — his extortion and
his ' wanton disregard of good faith in regard to
money.' Where this was required for the purposes
of his ambition, no consideration of the dignity and
influence of the Crown, of the welfare of the nation,
or of the justice due to individuals, was allowed to
stand in the way. He abandoned royal privileges ;
he alienated royal domains ; he sold not only char
ters to municipalities, but half the honours and
dignities of the kingdom to the highest bidder ; he
levied heavy taxes, and he wrung large sums from
individual barons and officers of State to appease his

RICHAED THE FIRST. 83
assumed anger. The better qualities of his mind
seemed to disappear under this thirst for the means
of war, and he was for the time the scourge of his
subjects. Yet, though he was covetous and extor
tionate, he was no miser. What he thus obtained,
he spent — some of it unworthily, no doubt, much of
it unwisely and heedlessly, but much also of it in the
prosecution of great ends, which were felt by the
nation then, though they might not be so now, to
be worth the spending of much money. He was
generous as well as extortionate ; and by the magni
ficence of his royal bounty he added to the reputation
of the nation abroad, while he impoverished both
it and himself at home. Faults thus redeemed
were easily forgiven by a nation which, under a
generally good administration and advancing foreign
commerce, for which the Crusade had opened fresh
outlets, was growing rapidly in wealth and self-
importance, and I see little reason for wondering
with one of the chroniclers, that the people were
contented under Eichard's scorpions, while they had
murmured under his father Henry's rods, that he
died amidst the loud lamentation that with him
had departed the glory of the world, and that his
name descended to succeeding generations as that
of one of the most popular of English kings.

e 2

84

JOHN.
In examining into the motives which appear to have
infiuenced the conduct of our Princes, we have
hitherto been able to recognise a considerable
ingredient of good; but we now come to a King
the actuating principle of whose life, if not always
flagrantly evil, was always purely selfish in the
narrowest and lowest sense of the term. It is not
any absence of intellectual ability either in the field
or in council, it is not the disastrous issue of his
Continental enterprises, it is not his acts of violence
and cruelty and his general misrule at home, it is not
his fits of passion, and his frequent personal humili
ations which really create in our minds that feeling
of abhorrence with which the memory of John of
Anjou has been almost universally regarded, from his
own times down to the present. This feeling, if I
mistake not, arises from a conviction of the entire
absence from the character of this, the worst, though
not the weakest, of the Plantagenets, of all good and
generous impulses. In nearly every one of our
Princes, we are able (on careful examination) to find

JOHN. 85
some traces of the better side of human nature ; but
the paramount spirit of John, after every allowance
has been made for his special misdeeds and his
special failings, appears to have been evil, and evil
in the most typical sense of the word. The essential
characteristic of absolute evil is absolute selfishness,
that selfishness which excludes all syinpa,thy with
anything beyond the supposed interests of the one
individual himself. With such anature there is but
one motive, self -gratification, and but one restraining
influence, fear, and hj these two balancing forces, it
seems to me, the character of John can alone be
explained. If I wished, indeed, to give an example
of the true diabolic type of character, I could not
find anywhere a better one ; and the epithet ' fease,'
which has been so generally bestowed by historians
on this prince, is but another form of expressing
the same judgment. Nothing could more con
clusively overthrow the theory of the compatibility of
intellectual grandeur of character with the spirit
of absolute evU. It is, perhaps, scarcely possible for
a very weak man intellectuaUy to be a perfect incar
nation of evil ; with an intellect of the highest order
it is quite impossible. A certain amount of ability
seems to be needed for the full development of the
characteristics of evil; but the higher qualities of
intellect imply also a broad consideration of the
relations of men and things, which is quite inconsis
tent with the narrow selfishness of pure evil. The

86 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
wisdom of evil scarcely rises above the level of
practised cunning, its courage above that of violent
self-assertion, and its energy above that of fitful and
capricious passion. Such a character is fortunately
rare in the pages of history ; but it is such a character,
as it seems to me, that we have to consider in esti
mating the qualities of John of England.
In person, John was not so powerfully built as his
brothers Henry and Eichard. Like his brother
Geoffrey, in whom there seems to have been much
that was similar in disposition, he was only of middle
height. But his features were handsome, and his
manners very attractive. He was a very pleasant
companion, possessed of a considerable amount of
humour, sometimes of the grim Anglo-Norman type,
but more usually of a lighter and more southern
character. His volatile levity (the true offspring of
his self-absorption) was conspicuous from his earliest
years. Though he was capable of deep designs and
bold entei-prises, he was at the bottom a mere trifler.
He was only earnest in his vindictive remembrance
of injuries. Otherwise, his anger itself, though
violent, excited rather contempt than fear. Like- all
the Angevins, he was well educated, and rather fond
of learning and of learned men. He had sense enough
to perceive the value of the one as an instrument of
self-interest, and he perhaps respected the others, as
among those least likely to come into active con
flict with his personal ambition. Like his Angevin

JOHN. 87
ancestors, also, he was very superstitious, with a
scoffing indifference to religion. His ambition was
sufficiently great to make him energetic in the asser
tion of his supposed or real rights and the furtherance
of his desires, and he had a large share of the family
abilities to assist and support him in this course.
He had the quick military eye of his brother Eichard,
and some of the qualities of a soldier as well as a
general. He was a coward rather morally than
physically, though his prostration of spirit on some
occasions was so abject that it assumed much of the
outward appearance of physical timidity also. So
completely did the whole nature of the man then
seem to grovel, that his unquestionable mental
and physical endowments seemed in complete abey
ance. He Avas often cruel, and cruel with the
intensity of apprehension. He distrusted all men,
because he was too conscious of the evil of his own
nature >to believe in the possibUity of disinterested,
and scarcely of interested, good faith in others.
The same belief in evil, however, led him to appeal
to the weaknesses and selflshness of others, with
considerable advantage at particular conjunctures.
On this he successfully relied for breaking up several
of the combinations against him of his disaffected
Barons, and through a more sagacious appeal to this
he secured to himself the support of a few — though
a very few — staunch friends, and of some of the
important municipalities of England. But he also

88 ESTIJMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
lost much by his general distrust of good in others,
for several times, by acting on his groundless sus
picions, he created the very dangers which his vio
lent precautions Avere meant to guard against. He
watched every man nearly as closely as did his father
Henry ; but he had not the patience to watch long
enough, and his action was as excessive in its violence
as it was generally premature. Nor did he possess
the exhaustless activity of mind and body of his
father and brother. When not roused to rapid but
fitful movement, he was sunk in indolence and the
grossest sensual indulgences. In pursuing these last
he had neither self-restraint nor common -sense. The
ignobleness of his nature discloses itself here un
mistakably. Not content with inflicting the most
grievous injuries on the honour of the highest
families in the land, he exulted in parading his
infamy, and proclaiming publicly with contemptuous
and coarse jests the downfaU of his victims, and the
dishonour of their relations. It was this conduct,
far more than any acts of feudal oppression, that
enrolled against him that phalanx of Barons to whose
exertions, guided by the wiser a,nd nobler counsels of
the Primate Langton, we owe the Magna Charta of
our Constitution. It was, indeed, against the per
sonal character of John, rather than against the
system of government which had prevailed more or
less ever since the Norman Conquest, that the wUl
of the Nation was at length roused and its liberties

JOHN. 89
asserted. Not only was John hated more bitterly
for the deepest personal wrongs, but there was the
most deep-rooted distrust of his good-faith. Dis
simulation and treachery were so habitually employed
by him as the agents of his policy, that they became
blunted and useless weapons in his hands. No one
could and no one did at last believe in what he pro
fessed, and he lost even the possibility of retracing
his steps. He had destroyed all belief in the pos
sibility of his becoming a good king, and he had
to submit to the brand of evil which his own conduct
had stamped upon his fame.
Among the lower classes, and the inhabitants of
some of the towns, who came less into personal con
tact with him, or who shared in some of his more
politic acts of bounty and grace, there were, no doubt,
less repugnance to the character of John, and a
greater disposition to condone his faults, than among
the higher orders, and the large cities such as London.
But even here there could be little enthusiasm for a
prince who, with all his pecuniary exactions, had lost
nearly all the Continental possessions of his family.
This, indeed, which perhaps told most against him
with the common people, was not regarded with any
particular sorrow by the Barons. It had been for
some time felt that the acquisition of additional
possessions in France, and the overthrow of the
House of Capet, might reduce England and the
EiigUsh Barons to a position of decided inferiority.

90 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
and it was now felt that the acquisition of the whole
of France would add a dangerous weight to the
power of the Crown. WhUe the sceptre was wielded
by such a man as Eichard the Lion-hearted, this
feeling of apprehension was almost lost in one of
national greatness and glory. But it was instinctively
felt that it was not the nation, but the personal
position of the King that would be aggrandised with
such a man as John; and against this personal
aggrandisement there was a general revolt of their
feelings as well as their understandings. Never had
the national cause or the national honour been the
mainspring of the actions of John. Even his greatest
act of resolution, his protracted stand against the
Papal pretensions, was a mere result of personal pride
and resentment, nerved by the popular support.
When his own excesses had shaken this support, and
he was terrifled at the impending French invasion,
on a reconciliation with Eome being offered to him
at the price of national degradation, he not only
made the concession, in which his brother had, to
some extent, anticipated him by his homage to the
German Emperor, though under peculiar circum
stances and for great ends, but seemed to delight in
parading the humiliation of the national dignity,
while exulting in his own personal deliverance and
bettered position. Such a man, his Barons reasoned,
should not be made greater through their means. To
this personal antipathy, which led to the desertion of

JOHN. 91
his vassals on more than one critical occasion, the loss,
of Normandy, the Angevin States, and a large part
of Aquitaine was in a great measure due, though the
conduct of the King himself, ever vacillating between
action and indolence, and between pertinacious as
sertion of his rights and their sudden and wanton
sacriflce, contributed to this fatal result, while it
afforded some additional excuse for the conduct of
the defaulters. But John himself preferred a mer
cenary to a feudal force, and this hireling soldiery,
while they were more than a match for the retainers
of the English Barons, and enabled the King to
almost crush the defenders of the Great Charter,
often betrayed his interests on the Continent by a
sudden desertion to the enemy. Meanwhile, from the
land of the Troubadours, came the angry complaint,
'I will make a sharp-edged sirvente, which I will
send to the King of England, to cover him with
shame, which, indeed, he ought to have, if he re
members the deeds of his forefathers, if he compares
them with his indolence in thus leaving Poitou and
Touraine in the possession of Philip. All Guienne-
regrets Eichard, who spared no treasure to defend it.
But this man has no feeling. He loves jousts and
hunting, to have hounds and hawks, to drawl on a
life without honour, and see himself plundered with
out resistance. I speak but to correct a King, who
loses his subjects because he wUl not assist them.
You, Sire ! you suffer your honour to fall into the

¦92 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
inire; and such is your infatuation, that, far from
being sensible to reproach, you seem to take pleasure
in the invectives with which you are loaded ! '
For once the language of the poets of Southern
France was but the expression of the bare truth, as
well as the echo of the sentiments of John's English
subjects. Well, too, had they fathomed the degra-
¦dation of his character in saying that he could feel
no shame. This point alone was wanting to com
plete the features of this portrait of evil. John was
an able man, incapable of using his abilities except
to his own destruction; a crafty man without sagacity;
a suspicious man -vrithout insight ; a learned man
without wisdom ; a rash man without courage ; an
obstinate man without firmness ;• a social man with
out sympathy ; and an evil man without shame.

HENBY THE THIBD.
It is not difficult to state the main characteristics of
Henry of Winchester. Without being a fool in
understanding, he was (perhaps with one exception)
the weakest in mental capacity of all the Plan
tagenets. He was, in himself, in everything, simply
insignificant, so far as a very weak man can be in
significant. It is, however, an unfortunate fact that
weakness by no means implies powerlessness to do-
harm to others, but that, on the contrary, it is one
of the greatest sources of evU and mischief, though
the moral responsibUity attaching to the weak-doer
himself may be comparatively slight. A very weak
man is, by virtue of that vei-y nature, at the mercy
of his own imperfect power of judgment, as well as
of the mistaken or iU-disposed suggestions of others,
and, without any malicious intentions on his own
part, perhaps even from a misdirection of good in
tentions, may destroy the happiness of those who
have deserved best at his hands. To deal with such
a man is even more dangerous sometimes than to.
cope with an avowed enemy. Under extremely

'94 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
favourable circumstances, indeed, and where the
opportunities of personal judgment and action are at
the minimum, and the counsels of good advisers
most infiuential, such a man may pass through life
without doing much, or even any mischief, and may
leave behind him chiefly the impression created by
an amiable disposition, and a kindly wish to act
rightly and pleasantly towards all men. But place
such a man in a position of power and responsibility,
where frequent action is demanded, and sound judg
ment on men and things is a constantly pressing
necessity, and the moral depravation of the character
may be incalculable, and the mischievous results to
others may be irreparable. Such a position was
that of Henry the Third. From his earliest years
he was placed in a situation which demanded the
exercise of more than ordinary sagacity, and in this
•quality he was unfortunately entirely wanting. Weak
men, who have been thus dangerously forced into
action, are divided in the course they pursue into
two classes. In the one class the mental incapacity
takes the form of overweening self-confidence, and
their conduct is consequently marked by a total dis
regard of the opinion and counsels of everyone else.
Perhaps this is the less dangerous class, since we
can ascertain with some certainty the tendencies and
limits of the incapacity, from our knowledge of the
personal character of the self-sufficient fool, and so
can guard to some extent against the consequences

HENRY THE THIRD. 95
of his foUy. But there is another class, who are
sufficiently conscious of their own incapacity of form
ing a correct judgment as to any course of action,
and who consequently are never happy unless they
are consulting and confiding absolutely in other men.
If there were any reliance to be placed on the con
stancy of this dependence, we might, even here, be
to a certain extent assured as to the future. But
with many of this class the distrust of their own
abilities, which leads them to consult and throw
themselves on another man, leads them also after a
time to distrust their own judgment of that man's
capacity for giving them good advice, or his dispo
sition to do so ; and then, hastily throwing off their
adviser, they repose as implicitly on the suggestions
of some new counsellor, to whom their weak nature
has been drawn by some chance, or in whose hands
they have been persuaded to place themselves by
designing intriguers. It is hopeless- to attempt to
anticipate the course of action of a man so swayed
to and fro, and it is quite vain to hope to guard
against the consequences of his vacillating confi
dences. Such a man was Henry the Third. A
modern writer says of him : — ' Henry spent his life
in pitiable alternations between blind confidence and
almost ludicrous mistrust. De Burgh, Des Eoches,
Peter of Eivaulx, Segrave, Montfort, and many more
experienced the same treatment, — the result, pro
bably, not so much of caprice, in the common sense

96 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of the word, as of a clinging weakness of character
and a conscious inability to estimate the men by
whom he was served. A suspicion which he was
incapable of forming for himself unnerved his weak
judgment when presented by another, and he fancied
himself betrayed and undone by the man to whom
but an hour before he would have trusted everything.'
Henry not only found it impossible to make up his
mind on any subject without referring to the counsels
of those who swayed him for the time, but he could
hardly ever be relied on, even by them, for continu
ing long in the same resolution. A curious example
of this is presented in his matrimonial negotiations.
It seemed as if he would never be married. Fair re
presentatives of Brittany, Austria, Bavaria, Bohemia,
and the Counts of Bigorre and Ponthieu appeared
successively in the field, only to be dismissed again,
seemingly without a reason. At last Eleanor of
Provence was in the ascendant, and her he ulti
mately married, her sister, the Queen of France,
writing significantly that she will not detain her
sister, lest Henry should change his mind.
It is very difficult to estimate the moral rank of
such a man. As I have said, it is possible, under
peculiar circumstances, that he may be and remain a
good man. But it will be seen at once that his
incapacity for action may also, not improbably,
be indicative of a similar incapacity to resist tempta
tions to evil. How far such deviations from the

HENEY THE THIED. 97
right may be conscious and intentional, and how far
they may be the results of a sheer incapacity to
discern the limits of right and wrong, it is not so
easy to decide. Henry was certainly not in his
nature an evil-disposed man, like his father John.
On the contrary, he appears to have been a kindly^
well-meaning man, so far as his blind prejudices and
equally blind confidences would allow. He did not
probably desire to do anything which he did not for
the time fancy that he had a right to do, and he
probably never wished to wantonly inflict ill on any
man. He preferred doing kind actions to the re
verse, and he would always rather think well of a
man than the contrary, if his weak, self-distrustful
nature, so easUy imposed on, would only have allowed
him to continue to think well of him. But he might
be persuaded to think any evil of any man, and
under the influence of this belief, he might be led to
commit the grossest injustice, and sometimes (though
not so frequently) acts of severe cruelty. His offences,
however, against morality lay chiefly in the direction
of absence of good faith. He was so constantly un
true to himself, and so often believed, and did one
day what he had thoroughly rejected and opposed
the previous day, that he seems to have lost all idea
of the sanctity or obligations of a solemn promise or
a deeply-plighted engagement. A more willing or
shameless perjurer there has scarcely ever existed.
On this point he had no scruples, and conscience
H

98 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
appeared to be utterly dead. Yet with all his fickle
ness and falseness, Henry was never hated as his
father John was. Men felt at times that he was
intolerable, and that he must be deposed, or sus
pended from the regal functions. But, personaUy,
though he was much despised, he was regarded with
the compassionate allowance which manifest weak
ness of character often inspires in stronger minds,
even when the injury suffered from it has been con
siderable. Henry was subject to violent fits of
passion, during which he behaved in the most un-
kinglike manner. But his resentment after it had
expressed itself in the first impulsive act of fury was
not of a permanently enduring character.. His will
was too feeble and changeable to admit of his being
lastingly vindictive, and he was spiteful rather than
revengeful. Like most of his race he was very
superstitious, and he was more really devout, so far
as the outward ceremonies of religion were con
cerned, than most of them. He had a real reverence
for sacred things, and men of truly saintly character
were always regarded by him with respectful and
admiring awe. But he was not restrained from his
perjuries or any offences by religious influences,
and he had as little scruple in plundering and
oppressing the clergy as in the case of the laity.
Both alike experienced the evils of his extortions as
they did of his general misrule. He was from his
very nature incapable of keeping money in his ex-

HENEY THE THIED. 99
chequer, and he was equally unscrupulous in the
means he employed to replenish his coffers. Like
many weak persons, he seems to have had the idea
that all men owed certain duties to him, without any
reciprocal acts being due on his part. He was made
to spend, and they were made to find the money for
his expenditure, — and he had a genuine sense of
being injured, if his subjects refused to continue to
supply his extravagance and foster his misgovern-
ment. It need not be said that the nature of his govern
ment vacillated with the paramount influence to
which he was for the time subject. Now it was kept
in some degree of order, and made conformable as
much as possible to law and justice, under the guar
dianship of the Earl Marshal and the tutelage of
Stephen Langton. Then came the firm, energetic,
but somewhat oppressive rule of Pandulf, when for a
time England became a dependency, in fact as weU
as in name, of the Court of Eome. The downfaU of
this was followed by the ascendancy and just but
unbending rule of Hubert de Burgh, on whose over
throw the King, for the first time, was able to in
dulge his own natural tastes without restraint, and
the rule ensued of the Foreign Favourites, which
precipitated the civil wars. Yet through aU these
changes of administration the King's thoughtless
and purposeless extravagance exercised a more or
less deleterious influence over the course of affairs.
H 2

100 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Favouritism is, as I have said, an almost unavoid
able imputation against Kings, whose personal friend
ships must of necessity assume much of that character,
and with such a weak man as Henry of Winchester
it was only natural that the favouritism should
appear in the most undesirable form. He did not,
like John, wUfuUy prefer bad men, but he took men,
good or bad, just as they caught his fancy and mas
tered his understanding. Now it was a Des Eoches
or a De Valence ; now it was De Montfort. But he
had a peculiar liking for foreigners as such, in pre
ference to Englishmen or Anglo-Normans. Whether
or not owing to the blood he inherited from his
mother, Isabella of Angouleme, or to that derived
from his grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was
essentiaUy Aquitainian or Proven9al in his cast of
mind and his tastes, though it was the Aquitainian
type in its feeblest and most degraded form. He
was not devoid, indeed, of personal courage, but his
whole cast of character was effeminate. The some
what stern energy of his Anglo-Norman subjects
annoyed, and their want of refinement disgusted
him, and he sought friends and associates in the
Continental school of manners. In accordance with
his character, he had not the deep and more serious;
learning of his Angevin ancestors, and cared little
for what we should call learned men. But he took
much pleasure in poetry and romances, and his
devoutness and his ajsthetic tastes both found a

HENRY THE THIED. 101
noble expression in the Abbey at Westminster. His
wife, Eleanor of Provence, was herself a poetess, and
a member of a highly accomplished family. Henry
inay (if he reasoned at all on the matter) have justi
fied his advancement of foreigners to high office in
England, by the fact that he was the Sovereign of
Oontinental as well as insular provinces, and that
Anglo-Normans ruled for the most part in Guienne
and Gascony. There was the important difference,
however, that the presence and rule of Enghshmen
were sought and demanded by the towns of South
France as a protection against their own feudal
oppressors, while in England town and country alike
revolted against the rule of aliens. Yet we cannot
wonder at or much blame this partiality of Henry's
(to which, indeed, we owe the introduction of the
great De Montfort into the field of English politics) ;
but he carried it to such an excess, and showed such
a disposition to substitute foreigners for natives in
every branch of the Administration, local as well as
central, that had it been submitted to, a second
Conquest would have been effected, and a second
Domesday Book would have been a necessity as well
as a project. Of course, the Barons resisted vigor
ously, though not with continuous concert ; and the
rest of the reign of Henry, do-svn to the rise of the
influence of his son Earl Edward in the administra
tion, was an oscillation between Eevolutionary go-
vernftients and Eoyal misrule. With the ascendancy

102 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of Earl Edward naturally began a new era in EngUsh
history, and the personal rule of Henry almost en
tirely ceased.
Such appears to me to have been the character of
Henry of Winchester, with whom sympathies and
tastes supplied the place of principles, and self-
assertion found its only doYelopment in inconstancy.
He was too weak a man to be either a good man or
a bad man. As a King, he was simply worthless.

103

EDWABD THE FIBST.
The descent of character from generation to gene
ration is liable to great surprises, and full of strange
seeming caprices of nature, but never in the course of
history has there been a more singular contrast pre
sented in the characters of a father and son than in
the case of Henry the Third and Edward the First.
With Henry the inteUectual calibre of the Plantagenets
seemed to have sunk to the lowest point, just as with
John the moral type had been most deeply degraded.
With Edward, the inteUectual capacity rose again
to the highest standard of the family, whUe moraUy
there was a corresponding and nearly equal elevation
of tone. We may safely assign to him the rank of
the greatest of our mediaeval kings ; and if I hesitate
in acquiescing in the still higher place which has
been claimed for him, of absolutely the greatest of
our Kings, it is not on account of any deflciency
in the breadth and nobleness of his ultimate ends;
but on account of a certain narrowness in his
conceptions of social relations which in the latter
years of his life became more and more apparent in

104 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the measures to which he had recourse, and which
tarnished his reputation with something of the
spasmodic violence of unskilful statesmanship. StiU,
this was only a shortcoming in a truly grand career —
an imperfection in an otherwise remarkable com
bination of mental and moral greatness, — a blot on
one of the fairest escutcheons that has ever hung in
the armoury of kingly achievements. I feel that to
do justice to a character so strong and so distinctly
marked in its main features, and yet so complex as a
constituent whole, is no easy task ; and I give this
estimate with some hesitation, and with a sense of
being open to misunderstanding on the part of my
readers, from the difficulty I have experienced in
making the matter clear to my own mind.'
Edward succeeded to the throne in the very prime
of manhood, not as an untried man, but well kno-wn
' When the present estimate was composed I had not had the advan
tage of reading the volume entitled ' The Greatest of the Plantagenets,'
the anonymous author of -which has recently given us his vie-ws in the
expanded and more matured form of The Life and Eeign of Ed-svard tlie
First.' Mr. Pearson, ho-wever, -whose -work I consulted -witli great advantage
to myself, liad seen and considered the former of these books, so that I am
probably indirectly indebted to it also for the favourable -vie-w here taken
of Ed-ward's character. While I fully concur in the praise -which has
been besto-wed by most competent judges on tlie ability of this unkno-wn
author, and the obligations to him of all students of English history, I
do not feel suificiently convinced by his arguments to induce me to
alter my own estimate on those points on -which it differs from his more
unreserved praise of tlie great king intellectually and morally. I have,
however, no-vv ventured, on the strength of those arguments, to assign
to the first Edward unreservedly the first place among our medimval
kings.

EDWAED THE FIEST. 105
{so far as his character had as yet developed itself) to
a nation towards which he had performed the two
functions of repression and conciliation, and had filled
the successive positions of the enemy to insurrection
for liberty, and the moderator of a triumphant
reaction. He may as well perhaps be introduced to
ns in the words written after his career was run, but
while the memory of his person and the general
fashion of his life was still fresh in the minds of
Englishmen. A contemporary — John of London —
thus describes him in a ' Commemoratio ' addressed
to Edward's widow. Queen Margaret, and though
allowance must be made for flattering exaggeration,
the main features of the portrait seem reliable : —
*His head spherical, his eyes round, and gentle and
dovelike when he was pleased, but fierce as a lion's
and sparkling with fire when he was disturbed ; his
hair black and crisp ; his nose prominent and rather
raised in the middle. His chest was broad; his
arms were agile; his thighs long; his feet arched;
his body was firm and fleshy, but not fat. He was so
strong and active that with his hand he could leap
into his saddle. Passionately fond of hunting,
whenever he was not engaged in war he amused his
leisure with his dogs and falcons. He was rarely
indisposed, and did not lose either his teeth or sight
by age. Temperate by habit, he never devoted
himself to the luxuries of his palace. He never wore
his crown after the day of his coronation, thinkmg it

106 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
rather a burden than an honour. He declined the
royal garments of purple, and went about in the
plain and common dress of a plebeian. Being once
asked why he did not wear richer apparel, he
answered, with the consciousness of true greatness,.
that it was absurd to suppose that he could be more
estimable in fine than in simple clothing. No man
was more acute in counsel, more fervid in eloquence,
more self-possessed in danger, more cautious in^
prosperity, more firm in adversity. Those whom he
once loved he scarcely ever forsook ; but he rarely
admitted into his favour any that had excited his-
dislike. His liberalities were magnificent.' It.
would appear that Edward's hair as a child was of
a light yellow colour, but became dark as he grew
older. He ivas considerably above the average height,
and very majestic in his bearing. ' His left eye had
the same singularity of the oblique fall of the eye
brow which had marked his father's countenance.'
His speech was hesitating, but in the fervour of his
earnestness it sometimes rose into irresistible elo
quence. His personal courage extended to rashness,
and even in the chase he wilfully encountered the
risk of piercing the stags with his sword when they
were seized, instead of using the safer hunting- spear.
We do not know anything of the studious and
literary side of his daUy life, and perhaps in this
respect he fell below the average standard of the
Plantagenets, but we gather from a casual notice

EDWARD THE FIRST. 107
that he took some pleasure in the perusal of the
chivalrous romances of his day. The learning of the
cloister, with which several of his ancestors had been
conversant, seems to have had as little attraction for
him as the clergy themselves had while he yet
remained in the unimpaired vigour of his natural
capacity. Such was the man in the external features
of his life, and with this picture before us, we come
to the consideration of the underlying stratum of his
personal character.
Edward stands out in contrast to the Sovereigns
who had immediately preceded him in the distinctive
character of a Founder. Since the Conqueror there
had been no King of England possessing so good a
title to that epithet ; for though there was much in
Henry the Second which belonged to the same type
of intellect, yet, owing, no doubt, in part to the
peculiar circumstances of his reign, he did not in
augurate any organic change in English society that
was so permanently infiuential as that which we owe
to the personal characteristics of Edward. Henry,
indeed, re-established social order and a system of
administrative justice ; but the ideas which lay at
the root of his government belonged to a transitional
era in civilisation, whUe those on which the polity of
Edward was built up stiU form constituent elements
in our social and political constitution at the present
day. If to the Barons in the time of John and
Henry the Third we are indebted for the preservation

108 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLIsH KINGS.
of the earlier landmarks of our national liberties, and
the progressive conservatism of our national spirit,
and if to Simon de Montfort in particular we owe the
first emphatic recognition of the bases of our repre-
isentative government, it is to Edward the First that
we must in justice refer the first regular operation
of our present constitutional system as the established
order of things, recognised as such, however unwil
lingly, by the King as well as by the other bodies
of the State. Thenceforward the Constitutional sys
tem in England gained a vantage-ground of prece
dent from which not all the anarchy and misgovern-
ment of succeeding generations were able to dislodge
it, and with this reign the history of the ' English
Constitution,' as distinctively so called, may be said
to begin.
There was much in Edward's character to render
him peculiarly qualified to undertake the great office
-of the inaugurator of a system of government. He
-combined the excessive regard for prescriptive rights
and precedents, which is our national characteristic,
with the love of system, and the administrative mar-
tinetism of our French neighbours. The excessive
legality of his mind has been remarked upon,' and
was at once its strength and its weakness. He wor
shipped precedent, and prescriptive rights found in
' I am indebted for my reference to this essential point in the
•character of Edward to Mr. Pearson, -whose sketcli of the reign of that
King forms the most able portion of his valuable ' History of England.'

EDWAED THE FIRST. 109-
him a willing and active supporter; and his adminis
trative system, whether the mere executive of these,
or springing from his own conceptions of right, was
always clothed most scrupulously in the rigid forms
of legal precision. So far as he himself was respon
sible for this system, it was generally actuated
by wise and always by anxiously just intentions,
though this justice was not unfrequently lost or dis
sipated amidst the inexorable logic and unbending
formalities of the administrative procedure through
which it was sought to cany it out. In this point
of view, his mind was almost too constructive, for it
rested with a sense of almost equal importance on
the symmetry and perfection of the details, and on
the main object to be achieved. This respect for-
precedent, this love of orderly procedure, and this
strong sense of justice, were no doubt the results of a
reaction in Edward's character from the irregularity
of the preceding reign, in which he had been an
impatient but not unobservant spectator, and at
first a rather turbulent actor. The loose and un
disciplined state of society during that reign had
faithfully reflected the nerveless and limp constitution
of his father's mind. Unstrung both in his moral
and intellectual organisation, Henry had been the
kindly, well-intentioned agent of manifold injustices,
which destroyed that respect for authority which is
the foundation of social order. Edward's mind was
only too rigidly strung, and in his excessive desire tp

110 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
prevent licentious irregularities, as weU in the ad
ministrator as in the subject, he sometimes forgot
to allow for the free play of those popular feelings by
a regard to which the -vdsest theory must (to be
efficacious) be more or less limited in its mode of
operation. But an excess on this side was perhaps
called for by the circumstances of the time, and was
certainly welcome to a people tired of oscillations
between licence and tyranny. The feeling which
Edward managed to impress on the mind of the
nation, that however severe or even unjust might be
the operation of his administrative system, he him
self was upright in his intentions and purposes,
tended to calm the troubled waters of society, and to
esta.blish a sense of permanent legal government, the
TecoUection of which was never again thoroughly lost.
There was the great 'simplicity of true earnestness in
the King's desire to do what was right by his people ;
and this, no doubt, had the effect of taking away
from his systematising the uncongenial impersonaUty
which often attends , the assertion of orderly law.
He was a lawyer in the keen precision of his intellect,
but withal a man of strong sensibilities as well as
strong personal will. If m one respect he represented
in himself the rigid inflexibility of Law, in another
his strong personal identification with the Law gave
to even his most unsympathising acts something of
the effect of a personal contact between his mind and
that of each of the subjects of his administration.

EDWAED THE FIEST. Ill
Thus whUe he sank Person in System, he personified
System itself, and to obey the Law became a syn
onym in the minds of all for obedience to Edward.
That his legality and systematising should have
been thus blended with intense personality arose, no
doubt, from another side of Edward's character—that
in which he presents himself to us as a self-wiUed
man, with strong, absolutist tendencies — imperious,
impatient of restraints, with all the insensibility to
suft'ering in others of one who is strong in endurance
himself. That there was this element — to some
extent a conflicting element — in the character of
Edward there can be little doubt. It was decidedly
in the ascendant during the flrst and during the last
periods of his life — before experience, and the study
of his great master and enemy, De Montfort, had
sobered him into statesmanship, and again, in ad
vancing age, when bodily infirmities and disappointed
scheming had weakened and embittered his mind.
But in the prime of his life, which includes the
largest portion of his reign, Edward's mind was a
happy union of these two strangely-coupled elements,
each of which supplemented and corrected the other.
He was not quite unbearably systematic, because he
was also so strongly personal in his acts. He was
not too imperiously absolutist in his ideas, because
he had so strong a feeling as to the established rights
,of others; He was not implacable or unforgiving in
many of the great crises of his career, because he

112 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
was personally so strong and self-reliant as to scorn
the feebleness of revenge on those who were for the
time powerless. He had too strong an association
in his mind between wise mercy and justice itself to
be wantonly or willingly cruel. It is a fact, that if
we except the few last years of his life, there is
scarcely one, if one, of our English Kings who can
compare with the poet's ' ruthless King,' in acts of
leniency and repeated forgiveness of injuries. That
the fiercer spirit was only chained, not permanently
exorcised, became too apparent ere his reign closed ;
but the provocation which led to the snapping of the
restraining bonds had been very great, and while we
condemn and deplore the actual outbreak, we must
give additional credit to the nobler nature which had
so long kept the evil passion impotent. If Scotland
can justly cast up against him the treatment of
WaUace and the determined ignoring of that national
will, which found an organ at last in Eobert Bruce,
we must remember that there is another side to the
tale of the Scotch negotiations, in which Edward
appears as the wise and punctiliously scrupulous
arbitrator between conflicting factions in that country,
called in by all parties, and acknowledged as Suzerain
by all who at that time were considered as entitled
to a voice in the decision of Scotland's destinies.
As far as the barons and clergy of Scotland are con
cerned, the case of Edward seems irresistibly strong,
and we can have as little sympathy, in that point of

EDWAED THE FIRST. 113
view, with Bruce as with Balliol or Comyn, or any
other of the selfish semi-feudal and semi-patriarchal
chiefs who alternately invited and deceived the
English King. It is only when we look at the na
tional feeling of Scotland, as it found vent gradually,
first through the rising but little estimated burghs^
and then through the leadership of a simple country
gentleman, that we feel that our sympathies ought
to change sides, and that Edward, in ignoring this
feeling, and refusing to see any but unauthorised in
surgents outside the pale of feudal law, was carried
away by an unfortunate combination of his excessive
legality of mind with his imperious spirit, checked as
it was at the moment of the realisation of his wise
and long-cherished wish for a peaceful consolidation
of the two portions of the island. He never suc
ceeded in realising the idea so finely expressed by
Wordsworth : —
The po-wer of armies is a visible thing,
Formal and circumscribed in time and space ;
But who the limits of that power shall trace,
Which a bravo people into light can bring,
Or hide at will, — for freedom combating,
By just revenge inflamed ?
Wales, which has been a fertile source of invective
against Edward, might well instead claim him as her
greatest benefactor. So far as he himself is concerned,
his conduct towards her and her faithless princOvS
seems to have been unexceptionable, and his leniency
towards the conquered and his frequent forgiveness Of
I

114 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the treacheries with which he was requited, are as
indisputable as the justice and liberality of his admi
nistration of the Principality, when conquered, is
confessedly remarkable. That he turned his attention
to the consolidation of the island under one system
of government, instead of frittering away the national
strength on Continental projects, is a great merit, and
not the less so because the extent to which he had
committed himself to this idea brought on him the
severest internal struggle between him and his people
that he experienced during his reign. The retention
of the province of Guienne had so completely ceased
to be an object of national ambition, that when
Edward's sense of duty to his Continental subjects
called him imperatively to their aid, he was crippled
and nearly ruined in his enterprise by the refusal of
his feudal vassals to follow him beyond seas, and he
found himself, under cover of armed resistance to his
demands, compelled at last, though the act was wrung
from him as if drawn from his very life-blood, to
grant such concessions and make such solid renunci
ations of illegal practices, that the contest between
Constitutionalism and Absolutism in England was
closed for his lifetime, and (through the force of the
precedent) virtually decided for ever.
The mention of this struggle leads us to the point
in Edward's character in which the two sides of it
are least easily harmonised. It must be remembered
that he had received during his early life a strong bias

EDWAED THE FIEST. 115
against concessions of disputed branches of the Eoyal
prerogative, particularly when attempted to be extor
ted by force of arms. As a King's son, he in his heart
believed in the justice of the pretensions of the Crowii
in these cases, and wUling as he was to. concede to
other classes their just rights, he was as unwilling to
give up what he imagined to be his own. Like a
really true man, he resisted the more and the longer
because it was his intention to keep the promise he
had once made. He did, indeed, more than once in
fringe on rights which he had virtually promised to
respect ; but he did so under the strong impulse of
national preservation, and when his breach of faith
was cast in his teeth by the assembled Barons, he was
affected to tears at the imputation on his honour, and
excused himself so earnestly, on the plea of the ur
gency of the necessity, that his deprecatory eloquence
moved the hostile gathering not merely to condoning
the offence, but to an additional grant of supplies
as its constitutional supplement. As a rule, indeed,
almost without exception, Edward's promise was
kept sacred by him, and, if given with reluctance,
might be safely relied upon. And a far greater
amount of exaction and severity of administration
than his would have been endured, while this safe
guard remained assured in the national mind.
Edward, however, failed in one respect (and to this,
as I have said, he owed his miscarriage in Scotland)
— he had a great respect for national opinion where
I 2

116 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
he understood the nation to be really represented, but
none for the popular effervescence which cannot find
a legal or constitutional channel, but yet represents
forces in the heart of the nation which no wise ruler
should disregard. By this irregular outburst of sen
timent, both the legal and the absolutist sides of Ed
ward's character were deeply offended. A demagogue
and a popular meeting, in our sense of the term,
would be equally incomprehensible and detestable
to him. He had no excessive love for his feudal vas-*
sals, but he respected their legitimate position, as
he did that of the civic corporations. But he could
not understand or tolerate the position of a Wallace,
who had no legal or social status as a leader of public
opinion in the eyes of the men of that century. He
resented this spirit of unauthoritative self-assertion
even in the instance of the great Corporation of
London, when it seemed to put itself forward as a
separate power in the State, and to dictate terms
alike to King and Barons. Much more would he
resent a less formal representation of popular wishes
and feelings. He was in his feelings perhaps the
most undemocratic of all our Kings, though the con
solidation of popular rights is really owing more to
him than to any English Sovereign from the Conquest
to the great Civil War.
I have said he loved the clergy but little. Yet he
•really saved the English Church from entire sub^
serviency to Eome, and ultimately from pecuniary

EDWAED THE FIEST. 117,
spoliation by the Holy See. Nor was he less careful
of what he considered to be the just rights and
interests of the clergy than of any other body of his
subjects. But he was determined to destroy for ever
the semblance of a dependency of the English Crown
on the Court of Eome ; he would suffer no co-ordinate
authority in England with that of the English law,
and he was bent on extending the obligations of law
and public service over all clerics equally with all
laymen. In this he was supported by the rest of the
nation very heartily, and he felt so assured of the
isolation of the clergy, and so convinced of the base
lessness of their claims to exemption, and of the
danger of allowing this insurgent spirit to go un-
crushed, that he instructed a knight to address the
Convocation in the following terms : ' Eeverend
fathers, if there be anyone among you who dares to
contradict the Eoyal will, let him stand forth, that
his person may be known and noticed as of one who
has broken the King's peace.' And on another
occasion, a clergyman deputed by his brethren to
present their remonstrance to the King died of fright
at the awful face of wrath with which the King re
ceived him. By the Statute of Mortmain Edward
laid the axe to the root of the tree of clerical aggran
disement, and placed an insurmountable barrier to
the subjection of the State to the Church, which at
one time seemed imminent.
In his expulsion of the Jews, Edward did not rise

118 ESTIMATK,"^ OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
above, but he faithfiiUy represented, the wishes of aU
classes of his subjects ; and if the act detracts from
his reputation on a wider platform, it cannot be said
to have sprung from any special or exceptional
characteristic of his own. He may have hated them
always, as a zealous Crusader; but as a King he
showed no exceptional animosity towards them;
indeed, he raised the murmurs of his subjects by
alleviating, to the utmost of his power, the circum
stances of their banishment ; and by that banishment
he, as King, lost a great amount of extraordinary
and indefinite contributions of money.
The private life of Edward, at least from the time
he attained manhood, was pure and high-toned. It
is recorded that in his youth he loved to gather
around him some of the free-lances and loose buckler-
companions of those disordered times, and gave them
great licence. This, perhaps, was the origin of the
stories of his rencontres and personal contests and
courtesies with Eobiii Hood and other outlaws of popu
lar fame. But as a husband Edward's relations were
happy and truly worthy of his great character. His
first wife, a Castilian princess, was one of the best
and most devoted of those who have borne the title of
Queen, and the affection of that stern and resolute man
towards her was a,s deep and enduring. But the nature
which was not too stern to be full of gentle affection
towards a high-minded wife became, unfortunately,
hard and unsympathetic towards an unworthy and

EDWAED THE FIEST. 119
effeminate son, and England probably suffered not a
little from those passionate outbursts of indignation
which destroyed all confidence between father and
son, and hence all influence for good on the character
of the latter.
I have endeavoured to point to some leading
aspects of the character of Edward the First, but his
mind was so many-sided that I cannot hope to have
fuUy expressed the Man, although I may have given
some idea of the King. He has been frequently
caUed the English Justinian, and he certainly com
bined in himself the presence and strong will of an
Emperor with the instincts and genius of a Legisla
tive Founder.

120.

EDWABD THE SECOND.
Once more the greatness of the House of Plantagenet,
which had grown to such dimensions under the first
Edward, was destined to dwindle, if not to the
proportions of the third Henry, at least to those of
decided mediocrity. Edward of Caernarvon, as. he
was distmctively called, was not an essentia.lly feeble
character, but a feeble and bad copy of a higher type
of mind. The handsome face, not unpleasing in
itself, but made unattractive by its unmeaning and
almost vacant expression, was the index of a charac
ter in which considerable abUities, strong feelings,
and refining tastes were neutralised or distorted into
gross defects, by the absence not only of all high
motive, but of all significant purpose. There must
have been from the first some essential ingredient
wanting in the composition of Edward, but there
can be no doubt that the natural deficiency was
aggravated by the circumstances of his early life.
Great men and strong men are not, as a rule, the
most happy in the management of their children.
Either they have too decided theories, or they have

EDWAED THE SECOND. 121
too limited sympathies, to accommodate themselves
to the demands and shortcomings of domestic life.
They either cannot tolerate the insubordination of
their own flesh and blood to their own peculiar ideas,
or presume on the existence in their offspring of
instincts of greatness and thoughtfulness, the former
of which are rare in young or old, and the latter of
which are incompatible with the characteristics of all
but a very exceptional childhood. Edward the First,
though a stern man from the gravity of his character,
was not an unkindly man in his personal relations ;
and his conduct towards his son, in early years,
however injudicious, was not such as to chaUenge
criticism on the ground of undue severity. Young-
Edward was left without the care of a mother at a
very early age, and although he seems to have suffered
less in some respects from that loss than many do, in
consequence of the kindly and sympathising treat
ment he experienced from his stepmother, there
can be little doubt that in the death of Eleanor of
Castile he lost that delicate and discriminating good-
sense and that elevated tone which no mere
sympathy and affection can replace. His father, too,
in the yearning agony of his own deeply felt loss,
seems to have sought relief in surrounding the
orphan child with every luxury and indulgence that
his own stately ideas of the royal position could
suggest. He made the young prince the centre of a
little Court, as brilliant in its exterior as he vainly

122 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
believed it was elevating in its internal influences.
He wished his son to feel like a king, so he brought
him up in a life of kingly magnificence. The charac
ter of young Edward was eminently one to deceive a
prepossessed spectator, such as a father naturally is,
as to his real bent and capacity. As I have said, he
was an imperfect imitation of something much
greater and better; and any such indications of
character, however slight and transient, would arrest
the attention and be exaggerated in the mind of a
paternal theorist. He would recognise in his son the
symptoms of many of his own early feelings, before
experience had strengthened and modified them;
and remembering how his own self-reliant character
had ripened and expanded under the most unfavour
able circumstances, he might well believe that a
character which seemed to indicate such points of
similarity would simUarly grow up to perfection
under more auspicious influences. Perhaps he was
not unconscious of the too great tension, not to say
hardness, of his own mind, and attributing this to
the severity of the school of discipline to which he
had been subjected, sought to soften its tone in his
young son. His plan seems to have been to place
around young Edward those who would control but
sympathise with his tastes, to maintain a watchful
eye over the general expenditure of the household,
but leave everything else to the operation of natural
character. The result was that the Prince, surrounded

EDWAED THE SECOND. 12S;
by pliant flatterers, who were afraid probably to-
mortify the King by telling him the real character of
his son, lost all idea of self-discipline, and aUowed
his mind to faU into a perfect chaos of imperfect
sympathies, unfulfiUed plans, inordinate fancies, audi
wilful irresolution and vaciUation. When this cha
racter at last displayed itself in its true colours to
the undeceived father, the result was a violent reac
tion from blind confidence to extreme reprobation,
to which disappointment and wounded pride gave
additional bitterness. The insolent insouciance with
which young Edward paraded his vices before his
father's eyes, as weU as the public, and the cool
effrontery with which he preferred his most un
palatable requests to the King himself, stung the
latter into a frenzy of rage, and destroyed aU chance
of a mutual understanding. His favourite tastes.
were music and horses, but no taste and no object
seemed to have a paramount or abiding hold on his
mind. He was always changing his plans and his
wishes, and the only thing in which he appeared to
exhibit any constancy was in his attachment to
persons. On those to whom he once took a fancy it
seemed as if his wandering mind concentrated itself
with a fixed intensity in proportion to his general
levity. Nothing was too great a favour to be
bestowed on them, and the idea of any limits or
proportions to his favouritism seems to have been
wholly wanting. It appeared as if the penury of

124 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
friendship in which a long line of ancestors had
lived was to be expiated by a plethora of the relation
in its most unwholesome quality. Whether the fa
voured objects of this princely affection were origi
nally unworthy or not, they seem to have all become
tainted with the same evil results of favouritism,
— excessive and insolent arrogance, and unbri
dled covetousness and licence. There was much in
the character of Piers Gaveston, the chief favourite
of Edward's earlier years, which might under
happier auspices have ripened into something mueli
nobler. He had considerable abilities, though seem
ingly little depth of character ; and he had all the
accomplishments of the day in an eminent degree,
and, at any rate, an external refinement of manners
above that of the surrounding nobility. But he
became, under the infiuence of this unbridled fa
vouritism, so intolerable that his ultimate murder
{for it was little better) excited no commiseration
except in his bereaved friend and master. So it was
with the younger Le Despenscr, who succeeded to
this post of head-favourite. One example of the
relation in which the reigning favourite stood to
the King and his subjects will suffice as an illus
tration of the whole subject. Walter de Whytle-
see, one of the monks of Peterborough, teUs us that
when the King, with Gaveston, visited that place,
the abbot sent him a cup worth fifty pounds. The
King immediately inquired whether Piers had

EDWAED THE SECOND. 125
received any present, and being answered in the
negative, he refused to accept the gift. The abbot,
hearing of this, sent to Gaveston a cup of the value
of forty pounds, who took it with a courteous air and
thanks. The messenger then asking the favourite if
the other cup was worthy of the King's acceptance,
and being told it was, mentioned to Piers that it had
been refused. Gaveston called his chamberlain, and
gave him these orders, — ' Go to Lord Edward, and
teU him that I am willing he should receive the
abbot's present.' The officer carried the rejected
cup to Edward with this message, and the King
then eagerly took it, and thanked the abbot for his
liberality. Gaveston, at least, may be said to have wilfully
thrown away one of the greatest chances of recon
ciling the favour of the King with the good-will of
the people that was ever offered to a Eoyal
favourite, for his first offences had been so far
condoned by the Barons, that a contemporary
historian, singularly thoughtful and unprejudiced, in
his judgments, declares it to be his decided opinion,
that if the favourite had thenceforth conducted
himself prudently and unostentatiously, or if the
King, preserving his attachment to his friend, had
conducted himself with due consideration to his
nobles, their opposition would have ceased. For the
favouritism of Edward was attended with this un
fortunate accompaniment, that he could not show his;

126 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
affection for one man without exhibiting insolent
contempt towards another. It seemed as if it
needed this foil of counter-ill-treatment of others to
complete his feeling of perfect friendship towards
any one. And unluckily his dislike generally mani
fested itself towards those of high rank, just as his
preferences were in the greater number of instances
(when he was left to his own choice) for those in a
low class of life. Gaveston was, indeed, the son of a
¦Gascon gentleman, and Despenser of an English
baron; but these had been first placed about his
person, the one by the old King himself, the other
by the Barons from among themselves, as a safe
person to engage the King's fancy. But his other
favourite associates from his early years appear to
have been born of a very low class, and in his
converse with them Edward seems to have lost all
sense of decorum, and of the reserve due to his
royal and even his personal dignity. The ' minstrels '
and idle persons with whom as a youth he suiTOunded
himself, found a counterpart in his later years in the
¦' mariners ' and rough and lawless people whose
society he was accused of frequenting overmuch.
He thus debased in the eyes of the nation two of his
most blameless tastes, — his passion for music, and
his love of ships and of the sea. It seemed as if
he could not endure that anyone should enjoy a
recognised position of dignity which was not derived
from his own favour, and he revenged himself on

JSDWAKD 'ilrlli SECOND. 127
hereditary rank by ostentatiously preferring plebeian
company and jiarvenus. The Barons of England,
whom a great King had not been able to overbear by
his imperial force of character, were not likely to
endure patiently insults such as these from one
whose tastes they could not appreciate, and whose
whole character they thoroughly despised. It is
hardly worth while to discuss the question of the
amount of truthfulness possessed by Edward. He
looked on promises as mere coin of the realm in
which he might pay his debts or -buy off opposition,
and which when necessary he lavished freely, without
regard to the past or the future. It is probable that
his moral sensibilities were never sufficiently alive to
the nature of truth to make his violations of it a
serious moral crime in him. He was simply a liar
when it suited him, just as he told the truth when a
lie was not necessary. Except in the prior order in
which perhaps it suggested itself to his mind, truth
had probably with him no preference.
The word frivolous^ perhaps, expresses most ex
actly the stamp of Edward the Second's mind. His
fitful energy, such as it was, never inspired any
feeling of respect in friends or adversaries. He was
personally brave, without gaining any of the re
putation attaching to physical courage; he was
generous, without creating an abiding sense of
grateful obligation, and lavish without giving the
impression of magnificence; he was excessive and

128 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
persistent in his friendships, without securing in his
favourites that respect which is the essential basis
of true friendship ; his activity, though considerable
when he was once roused, never effaced the general
impression of his indolent apathy ; his greatest con
cessions and personal sacrifices to the demands of
his subjects or of the occasion were so manifestly
unreal, that they never produced the effect of solemn
guarantees; his most harmless and praiseworthy
tastes became occasions of scornful criticism by the
manner in which he pursued them, and his natural
perceptions of a social refinement superior to the
hardy but coarse habits of life prevalent among his
baronial aristocracy were robbed of much of their
essential delicacy, and of nearly all their effective
influence over others, by being associated with
pursuits of a low or, at any rate, undignified
character. From the first, Edward appears to have
formed no definite plan of life, except one of self-
enjoyment for the passing hour. He had no
foresight, and made no attempt to think beforehand,
except when animated by the impulses of eager
desire for fresh pleasures, or an intense thirst for
revenge. For his mind, loosely knit in other points,
was capable of retaining implacable resentments.
He confounded the love of peace with indolence,
refinement with luxury, independence with self-
indulgence, and a strong administration with the
destruction of all opponents of his free exercise of a

EDWARD THE SECOND. 129
wanton will. He seemed to have been born to throw
discredit on possible virtues, even more than to point
the moral of positive vices. His character was full
of suggestions of something better, and occasionaUy
of something great ; but it contained no realisation
of anything. If the kindliness of Henry the Third's
character saved him from the dislike which many of
his actions merited, this dislike was called forth and
deepened continually in the mind of the nation to-r
wards Edward the Second by the very buoyancy pf
his temperament. It must have seemed to them
that a Prince who could treat life and sovereignty
with such gay levity, was not entitled to the aUow-
ance which might be made for those who acted
erroneously or even unjustly under a more solemn
sense of the weight of their responsibility. A mere
trifler who violates national rights, outrages national
sentiments, and executes national champions, must
not expect to inspire even the ordinary respect of
hatred. A feeling of contemptuous aversion and
disgust became predominant throughout England,
which seemed to clamour for a punishment igno
minious in its cruelty. The King who degraded the
royal dignity by low companionships and undue
familiarities' perished himself, at length, from the

' It has been suggested to me since I -wrote the above, that the
pectdiar detestation -with which the memory of Edward the Second -was
regarded in his own times, sprang in a great measure from the popular
belief in the criminal character of his relations with his favourites. I

130 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
destruction in the people of all respect for the Eoyal
person. And so it was that, without being by any
means the worst of our English Kings, so far as
respects actual moral delinquency, Edward the Second
went to his grave less regretted and less respected
probably than any King before or after him. It is
enough condemnation of him to say that he was his
father's son, and yet that he died hated and despised
by the English nation,
fail however to discover, in the tone in -(vhich this offence is referred to
in the -writers of that age, any suiEcient support to this explanation.

131

EDWABD THE THIBD,
Few English kings have left behind them so great a
reputation in the chroniclers, and yet few kings are
so slightly delineated in their personal characteristics
as Edward the Third. Everybody thinks of him as
a sort of impersonation of the spirit of chivalry, but
beyond this, few, I believe, have any deflnite ideas
concerning him, and beyond this the chroniclers
themselves preserve to us but few traits. Their
antithetical summaries of his character are but
faintly discriminating panegyrics, which approach
too much to the nature of tombstone memorials to
be very useful in an analysis of the man, though
they may give us some general idea of his stamp as
a king. And it is, in fact, only through a considera
tion of his kingly qualities that we can at aU deduce
any idea of the personal character of Edward. He
began to reign with the cares at least, if not the
responsibilities of a ruler, from his very boyhood,
and his personal life was so interwoven with that of
the nation, that to separate the two is impossible,
until the shadows of his last melancholy years obscure
the kingly presence, and leave only the -wretched
K 2.

132 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
and common-place picture of a doting and disrepu
table old man. His reputation, which was for so
many centuries looked upon as an integral part of
the national treasury of glory, has of late years
suffered a considerable diminution in the estimates
of historians,' and I am inclined to think to a
somewhat unjust extent ; for, though I am not
disposed to dispute the truth of the verdict which
displaces him from the pinnacle he so long occupied
as the greatest of our kings, 1 still think that a
character may be safely assigned to him which
places him decidedly above the average of English
Eoyalty. The modern reaction against mere mili
tary glory, and the idea that Edward engaged in his
French and Scotch wars through ambition or mere
love of fighting, and was himself nothing more than
a brave knight, have, I believe, carried away some
able writers from a wider and fairer consideration of
his qualities, and have reduced their estimate to
something like a sermon against selfish ambition
and bloodshed.
Edward the Third's character stands in a very
remarkable relation as well as contrast to that of his
father. Edward the Second, as we have already
seen, was a bad copy and imperfect reaUsation of
' This was written before I had read Mr. Freeman's unfavourable
estimate of Edward lately republished in his collected essays. This able
paper, which represents a view of the character which I had onco my
self adopted, does not alter my later judgment, which was formed ou a
more careful and minute consideration of the facts.

EDWAED THE THIRD. 133
a fine character. In Edward the Third the copy
was successfully achieved, and the conception was
realised, but the substratum of character was much
the same in both. In both the JEsthetic and sensuous
elements were predominant, — the love of pomp and
luxury, the pleasure of outward display, and the ap
preciation of what are considered the refinements
and mere ornaments of life. In the character of
-each there was latent a feeling that the King should
be the social leader of the nation he governed, even
more than her commander in war and her adminis
trator in peace. In neither of them was there the
originality or the incisive force of Edward the First.
The character of both was moulded to a considerable
extent by external circumstances, from which, how
ever, one alone drew lessons of wise experience. All
three were capable of committing great acts of cruelty,
but the cruelty which in the First Edward resulted
from an outburst of ungovernable fury in a forgiving
nature, was in his two successors the dictate of a
settled resentment, which in the Second Edward was
furtive yet implacable, in the Third Edward was open
and hard to be appeased. But in the Third Edward
the pageant and pomp of life rose into a stately
magnificence, contrasting with, but not unworthy of
comparison with, the simpler stateliness of his grand
father, and far above the tinsel of his wretched father.
His luxurious tendencies were for the greater part
of his life relieved from reproach and ennobled by

134 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
being associated with great purposes and energetic
enterprises. He made himself the social centre, not
of a little set of unworthy favourites, but (in all but
his closing years) of the entire nation, which he
refined without demoralising. His aesthetic tastes
found vent in great architectural achievements, and
his natural courtesy of demeanour never sank into
undue familiarity, but preserved the character of
dignified though easy condescension. He, in fact,
was a high-bred gentleman in every sense of the
term- But the decay of his faculties disclosed the
inherent similarity in the tone of character between
father and son, and the decline of Edward the Third
approximated to the prime of Edward the Second,
The personal appearance of Edward the Third
corresponded to his type of character. He had not
indeed the physical presence of his grandfather, for
he was not above the middle height, yet such was
the dignity of his bearing that contemporaries seem
to have been equally impressed. He did not inspire
awe, but he secured admiration and respect. He
must have been very attractive, and his countenance
appears to have fascinated spectators. He had
handsome features, like his father, but they were
animated with the most expressive and noble sweet
ness. His panegyrists speak of his expression as
divine, and we may well conceive that the union of
lofty courtesy and genial brightness in his looks
exercised a spell over those around him which may

EDWAED THE THIED. 135
partly justify this flattering exaggeration of language.
We are told that he loved hunting and hawking, but
his favourite recreations from the cares of royalty
were the chivabous and martial exercises of the
period — tournaments — in which he was himself a
most accomplished proficient. Again and again,
when the vizor of the successful champion was raised
at the conclusion of the contest, the assembled
crowds were excited to fresh enthusiasm by discover- .
ing that the unknown knight was no other than the
King himself. And tournaments had a bearing and
value much beyond the mere exhibition of a childish
pageant. They brought together all classes of
society, and bound them, for the time at least, in a
connecting link of common tastes and enjoyments.
The King emerged from his palace, the great baron
left the dismal seclusion of his feudal castle, the
citizen quitted his workshop, and the peasant aban
doned his plough, and all met together on the same
platform of a common enjoyment and a common
expectation. Such bonds of society were especially
-valuable in an age emerging from an exclusive and
oligarchical feudalism, and passing into a state of
society of which wealth and hereditary rank were
the bases, in place of military tenures. It was this
transitional character which imparted its charm to
the age of chivalry, for while it retained aU the
romance of arms, it blended with this many of the
softer and more graceful features of a higher civUisai-

136 ESTOIATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
tion. The rules of courtesy and the obligations of
humanity were still indeed placed on a very limited
basis, so far as class distinctions were concerned,
and the ideas which were inculcated by this
code were often fantastic and extravagant ; but the
tree once planted, however misteadily, soon became
fixed in the earth, and spreading its roots far and
wide, passed beyond the limits of one soU, and drew
from this more varied nurture a more luxuriant and
a healthier growth.
But Edward the Third was not only in sympathy
with, but beyond his age in this point of view. He
represented faithfully, as I have said, the . spirit of
chivalry ; but he also anticipated, to some extent, the
predominant feeling of the age which chivalry was
ushering in. He did not, it is true, like his father,
seek to gratify his sociable tendencies by descending
to famUiar intercourse with men of low rank and
habits ; on the contrary, he made companions and
associates, in peace as well as in war, of his great
Barons and their sons ; and he thus broke more
effectually the strength of the feudal array, by
drawing its members away from the independence of
their local territorial influence, than his predecessors
had ever been able to do by force or by fraud. The
great Baron, who previously prided himself on being
bound to the Crown only by strictly-defined feudal
obligations, was now comparatively powerless under
the spell of personal association with the Kiog and

EDWARD THE THIED. 137
common sympathies and aspirations. Attendance
on the royal wars was no longer the grudging dis
charge of a tax upon property, but the opening of
a field of distinction on which, by personal feats, a
European reputation might be established far excel
ling the narrow pride of a local baronial position.
But Edward did not contract his sympathies to the
limits of this baronial companionship, but gratified
his hereditary predilections by also associating him
self, without losing his due position, with the mass
of the population, and especially with the middle-
class. He lived in public, in the sight of the nation,
seeing habitually and exchanging courtesies with all
classes, without lowering himself to the rank of any,
though he naturally preferred the closer and more
congenial companionship of the higher classes. His
urbanity and his accessibUity are spoken of in
marked tones by the chroniclers, and from those
qualities, after all, was derived the great reputation
which descended to posterity in connection with his
name. But beyond this, he has the merit of per
ceiving the rising influence of the middle-class, and
of interesting himself warmly in the progress of its
commercial prosperity. He fostered the estabUsh-
ment of commercial guilds and companies, granted
fresh privUeges to civic corporations, and regulated
his foreign aUiances to a considerable extent by con
siderations of commercial advantage. The foreign
commerce of England was protected by the assem-

138 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
blage of formidable fleets ; the complaints against or
on behalf of English merchant ships became a pro
minent feature in international negotiations, and
the rivalries of English and foreign commerce became
an important element in the national policy. Again,
though Edward's personal associates were of the
aristocratic class, he turned for support in his
government, and he recognised a responsibility in his
administration to the middle-classes, as represented in
the House of Commons, and especiaUy to the re
presentatives of the boroughs. He anticipated the
Tudors in making, if possible, Parliament the accom
plice in his public acts, and he sought even to engage
their complicity in his foreign policy by an artful
appeal for their advice, which the wise Commons
respectfully declined to give. He recognised in the
House of Commons the dominant element in the
Parliament. He did not seek to crush the other
orders; on the contrary, he recognised them aU
in their several spheres of infiuence ; but Parliament
he recognised as the especial sphere of the. middle-
classes, and he respected and negotiated with them
here accordingly. During the reign of Edward the
Second the struggle had been mainly between the
Crown and the feudal Barons, and Parliament had
been little else than a conclave of armed vassals of
the Crown, who browbeat others or were brow
beaten in their turn by an attendance of armed
retainers. But in the reign of Edward the Third —

EDWAED THE THIRD. 139
though (especially towards the close of his reign) the
struggle between prerogative and liberty was nearly
as vivid — the scene of contest was the floor of the
House of Commons, and the King and the Barons
were but accessories, or at best leaders, in struggles
in which the benches of the House of Commons were
canvassed by both parties for the decision of the
quarrel. Edward the First had so far recognised the
coming times as to coUect irregular and special little
parliaments of traders and employers of labour, to
give him advice on matters connected with their
¦pursuits, and to assess for him his extraordinary tax
ation. But taxation had been so palpably the main
object of these appeals, that the middle-class was
very shy of responding to them. Edward the Third
pursued the same policy, but he made it also the
guiding] rule of Eoyal proclamations and of the
enactments which his Ministers proposed in Parlia
ment, and he assigned to the middle-class an authority
on national as well as special legislation. He had
the wisdom to encourage all corporate representations
of the middle-class, and to recognise in them a con
servative instead of a subversive element of govern
ment. He thus (as long as his mind remained un
impaired) rendered himself the King of the middle-
classes as much as of the nobles ; and he based his
national militia quite as much on the one as on the
other. The craftsmen and yeomen of England were
not, as in France, the mere supernumeraries of the

140 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
army, but its substantial strength. To have seen and
acted thus is not the characteristic of a mere Knight-
Errant, and however great may have been the short
comings of Edward in other respects, the basis of his
character must be widened to allow for this broader
statesmanship. The pages of Froissart and the other chroniclers
of this period are so full of Ulustrations of the
chivalric qualities of Edward the Third, and also of
the less pleasing manifestations of a temperament in
which the severer tone of Edward the First supersedes
for a time the gentler features of his grandson's mind,
that I should only weary my readers by the repetition.
The scene after the taking of Calais is well known,
and the latest and most conscientious historian of
Edward ' is inclined to adopt Froissart's version of
the intended cruelty and sudden relenting of that
King on the intercession of his Queen. Another
story, less familiar to the general reader, though also
told by Froissart, supports the truth of this represen
tation of Edward's character. The King of France
having caused some lords who had been taken and
exchanged by the English to be executed on suspicion
of treason, Edward determined to retaliate upon
Sir Herve de Leon, his prisoner, and would have
done so, if the Earl of Derby had not thus remon
strated : ' My Lord ! if that King PhUip has rashly
had the villany to put to death such valiant knights as
' Mr. William Longman.

EDWARD THE THIRD. 141
these, do not suffer your courage to be tainted by it j
for in truth, your prisoner has nothing to do with
this outrage. Have the goodness, then, to give him
his liberty at a reasonable ransom.' The King
ordered the captive knight to be brought before him,
and said, ' Ha ! Sir Herve ! Sir Herve ! my adversary,
Philip de Valois, has shown his treachery in too cruel
a manner when he put to death so many knights.
It has given me much displeasure, and it appears as
if it were done in despite of us. If I were to take
his conduct for my example, I ought to do the like
to you, for you have done me more harm in Brittany
than any other. But I shaU bear it, and let him act
according to his own wUl. I will preserve my own
honour unspotted, and wUl allow you your liberty at a
trifling ransom, out of my love for the Earl of Derby,
who has requested it, but upon condition that you
perform what I am going to ask of you.' The
Knight replied, 'Dear Sire! I will do to the best of
my power, whatever you shall command.' The King
said, 'I know. Sir Herve, that you are one of the
richest knights in Brittany, and that if I were to
press you, you would pay me 30,000 or 40,000 crowns
for your ransom. But you shall go to King PhUip
de Yalois, my adversary, and tell him from me, that
by putting so many knights to death in such a dis
honourable manner, he has sore displeased me ; that
I say and maintain that he has by these means
broken the truce he had agreed to ; that from this

142 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
moment I consider it to be broken, and that I send
him by you my defiance. In consideration of your
carrying this message, I will let you off for 10,000
crowns, which you wiU send to Bruges in five days
after you shall have crossed the sea. You will also
inform all such knights and esquires as wish to
attend my feast not to keep away on this account, as
we shall be right glad to see them, and they shall
have passports for their safe return, to last for fifteen
days after it shall be over.' The Knight gladly
undertook and punctuaUy performed the royal mes
sage. This is in itself a picture of Edward which
needs no comment.
His veracity is open to some question, for it seems
to have been too much dependent on the technical
rules of chivalry, and to have been less an instinct of
his own mind than was the case with his grandfather.
But if he fell below the latter in this respect, he
certainly rose far above his father in habitual
sincerity, and the actual deficiency was perhaps as
much one of temperament as of conscious un
truthfulness. He neither rose much above nor fell
beneath his predecessors in his resort to iUegal
measures, but he was wiser than several of them in
recognising the expediency of timely retractation and
concession. He was perhaps a more faithful per
sonal friend than a just and constant master to his
Ministers of State. He was evidently deficient in a
keen instinct of justice, but he was not often wantonly

EDWAED THE THIED. 143
unjust ; and if not quite a reliable, he was generally
a kindly master and administrator.
His foreign policy has been much blamed, and the
terrible error of claiming the Crown of France into
which his enterprising and warUke spirit betrayed
him showed a great falling-off from the better
policy of Edward the First. But even this had
the recommendation that it served as a vent to the
warlike turbulence of his Barons, and buried the
remembrance of civil discords and enmities under
an accumulation of common national glories. Nor,
considering the aggressive policy of the French
Kings towards the English possessions in France,
was it a gratuitously offensive policy. It might well
appear to be a case in which there was no medium be
tween giving up everything and claiming everything,
in order to obtain a fair compromise ; and had the
peace of Bretigni proved a more permanent settlement
of the question, some might perhaps praise what they
now condemn. As respects Scotland, Edward did
but follow in the steps of his grandfather, and wiser
than the latter, perhaps from the greater pliancy of
his nature, he learned at last and adopted the true
policy towards that country.
Of the last years of this remarkable King I have
abeady spoken. His grandfather's mind had also ex
hibited signs of decay a few years before the close
of his reign; but then Edward the First attained the
age of sixty-eight, while his grandson died before he

144 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
had completed his sixty-fifth year. Both were called
upon to assume a leading and active part in public
affairs prematurely, and in both, in consequence,
there was a premature exhaustion. But, in the case
of Edward the First, the decay soon ended in death,
whUe it continued with his grandson until scarcely a
vestige was left of his great reputation, and he had
become a mere puppet, scarcely responsible for his
actions, in the hands of designing men, and an
insolent and greedy woman. But his character
must in justice be estimated by reference to his
earlier years, when his mind was both vigorous and
mature, and he wiU not then probably be judged
wholly unworthy of the title of the greatest Eoyal
leader of the whole of English society, as weU as the
first hero-King of the ivJwle English nation.

145

BIGHABD THE SECOND.
To the dotage of a once great King succeeded the
minority of a boy in the eleventh year of his age, and
to a reign which (notwithstanding its melancholy
close) had been, as a whole, one of the most briUiant
in our annals, succeeded a period which must be
pronounced as one of the least reputable of any as
respects the conduct of both King and People. The
contemporary poet, Gower, having before his eyes the
actual state of England, thus contrasts with it the
true ideal of government : —
For all reason wolde this ;
That unto him which the head is.
The members buxome shall bowe :
And he shulde eke their truth alowo
With all his lierte, and make them chere,
For good connsell is good to here.
Although a man be wise hymselve,
Yet is the wisdom more of twelve,
Never has there been a time when this wise counsel
of the poet's was more needed or more completely
disregarded. Nowhere in English history is there a
period in which we are so compelled by justice to
L

146 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
look with almost equal disapprobation on the conduct
of all political parties, and at no time has the
national character appeared to so little advantage.
The King would listen to no wise counsel, the great
men would pay no reverence to his person, and the
mass of society was turbulent and anarchic to an
extent almost unprecedented in this country. The
political morality of all seemed to have degenerated,
and the disgraceful vicissitudes of violence and
subservience in both King and People should always
prevent any student of our history from declaiming
against the conduct of other nations, and dog
matically pronouncing it an indisputable proof of
their incapacity for self-government or for any
settled government at all.
The best excuse for the conduct of Englishmen at
this epoch lies in the unfortunate circumstances
under which this reign commenced, and under the
influence of which the relations of King and People
were first formed. A chUd succeeded to a great
reputation, but also to an inheritance of disaster;
a People to the recent memory of triumphant
success, and to the present shame of helpless and
ignominious discomfiture. Eichard was the grandson
and son of the heroes of Cre9y and Poictiers, and he
succeeded to the government of a country whose
shores were devastated by the hostile fleets of that
people to the sovereignty of whom his predecessor
had laid claim, and a large part of whom he had

RICH.ARD THE SECOND. 147
actually succeeded in temporarily reducing under his
authority. The elder Edward had died in dis
creditable obscurity, the younger had preceded him
to the grave broken down by disease and disappoint
ment. The nation, one-third of whose population
had been swept away by pestUence, and which had
been drained of its best blood by the demands of
military service, and straitened, if not impoverishedj
by frequent exactions of money, was demoralised by
long-continued and latterly disastrous warfare, and
had lost its self-respect, as well as all respect for
constituted authorities. The old standard of faith
had been shaken by the preaching of the Lollards,
without the firm establishment of a new one, and the
mind of the nation at large had been leavened rather
with a distrust of all government and all social
institutions than with any higher conceptions of
right a,nd order. The religious movement had taken
a social turn, and the lower orders were awakening
not only to a sense of their state of servitude, but to
a conception of the spirit of Christianity wholly
at variance with the distinctions of rank and class as
well as with the exclusive canons of chivalry. Thus
the demoralisation of the upper and middle classes was
coeval with the first blind and blundering steps into
freedom and self-respect of their long down-trodden
and despised serfs; and the representatives and
standards of social order and authority were never
less Ukely to command respect, than when that

148 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
yespect was most needful to preserve both law and
.society from a terrible overthrow. The nobles, more
and more abandoning the military career — now no
longer a field of glory and gain — were thrown back
on political intrigues and the desire of personal
aggrandisement at home, and they found only too
tempting an opening for their ambition in the feeble
rule of a minor, surrounded by ambitious uncles, and
with no wise or efficient ministers to shape his policy
or foi-m his character.
Under such unfavourable auspices, the son of the
Black Prince grew up from boyhood to youth and
manhood, and these circumstances must have had
more than common influence over a character na
turally possessing many elements of both good and
evil. Had the men placed at the side of young
- Eichard in his early years been such as to command
his inward respect, as well as to enforce his outward
acquiescence in their advice, and had the Par
liamentary regime which the last reign had in-
-augurated, and to which the circumstances of his
minority necessarUy gave additional power and
vigour been steady and moderate, the worst tendencies
in the King's character might never have fuUy
developed themselves, and the stronger and finer
sides of his mind might have predominated. But
exactly the reverse was the case. A contemporary
chronicler, quoted by Sharon Turner, gives the
foUowing description of Eichard's person and habitsi.

EICHAED THE SECOND. 149
^ He was of the common size, yellowish hair, his face
fair and rosy, rather round than long, and sometimes
diseased ; brief and rather stammering in his speech.
In manners unsettled, and too apt to prefer young
friends to the advice of his elder nobles. He was
prodigal in his gifts, and extravagantly splendid in
his dress and banquets, but timid in war; very-
passionate towards his domestics, arrogant, and too
much devoted to voluptuous luxury. So fond of late
hours, that he would sometimes sit up all night
drinking. HeavUy taxing his people, scarcely any
year passed in which he did not get grants of
fifteenthSj which were consumed as soon as they
reached his treasury. Yet there were many laudable
features in his character: he loved Eeligion and
the Clergy; he encouraged architecture; he buUt
Westminster almost entirely, and the Carthusian
Monastery near Coventry, and the Dominican at
Langley.' His character was not one which it is easy
to explain satisfactorily, for the seeming con
tradictions in it are such that we are almost left
{with our scanty materials) to a doubtful alternative
of styling him either an energetic tyrant or a weak
voluptuary. In fact, he had in him the elements of
both, combined with a fitful and inconstant sense of
right. He was the victim of early dictation ; he had
been goaded by it into an intolerance of all advice
and aU restraint. He was made the involuntary
mouthpiece of one ambitious man after another, each

150 ESTIJL4.TES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
claiming his obedience on the ground of superior
age and hereditary position in the State, and none
commanding it by the respect inspired by their own
character, until he hated all but young men, believed
in the wisdom of young men only, and thought that
the only security for the devotion of such to himself
was the obligation under which they laboured of
owing their great position to his favour alone. The
Houses of Parliament, which might have mitigated
the mismanagement of his advisers, instead of
merely controlling the Administration and restraining
the extravagant tastes of the young King by a
constant but moderate supervision, and at the same
time upholding the royal dignity against the en
croachments of nobles and ministers, abused their
newly acquired prerogatives, and made constitutional
government hateful to Eichard by associating it
merely with antagonism to all his wishes and
disrespect to his person. Nor was his a character
for which such rude schooling was at all appropriate.
He possessed, it is true, the luxurious constitution
of the Second and Third Edwards, and not a little, of
the wilful selfishness of the former of these princes,
but combined with these were a fierceness of temper
and persistence of purpose more resembling his
father or the First Edward. His luxurious tastes, if
his advisers had been more sagacious and congenial,
might have risen to magnificence, instead of de
generating into lavish and indiscriminate extrava-

EICHAED THE SECOND. 151
gance. If in his excessive love of making elegant
presents he gave his uncle Lancaster, when the
latter went to Spain, a golden crown, and his duchess
another ; if, notwithstanding the necessities of his
treasury, he spent on his marriage 300,000 marks,
besides the costly presents he made ; and if he
presented Leo, the King of Armenia, when he came
to England, with a thousand marks of gold in a gUt
ship, with the grant of a pension of the same sum
yearly, it is the disproportion rather than the in-
appropriateness of the profusion which we must
condemn, and his expenditure was narrowed in its
scope and lowered in its stamp by the attempt
to deprive him of his legitimate authority as a
Sovereign. In consequence of the ill-judged cha
racter of the interference, young Eichard came to
associate extravagance with freedom of action, and
seems to have acted rightly only when the advice of
the cons-fcituted counsellors of the Crown had not
been proffered to that effect. Thus, in Ireland,
where the authority and advice of Parliament and
the Council of Peers were comparatively in abeyance,
the King seems to have executed impartial justice to
the best of his power, and to have redressed grievances
and enforced order. His mind possessed too much
natural vigour to be tamely acquiescent under the
subservience in which he had been brought up. He
was a voluptuary, but he was not satisfied with the
mere pleasures of a voluptuary,' without power or

152 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
position in the State. He wanted to assert his
power not so much, probably, for the sake of being
able to abuse it, as from a desire for free agency.
But however eager to be emancipated from control,
he had the patience to wait his opportunity, the wit
and cunning to dissimulate, as weU as the promptitude
to act when he thought the moment had arrived.
His presence of mind on the occasion of the Wat
Tyler insurrection might, have warned the Magnates
of Parliament that they were not dealing with a
contemptible adversary, and might have led them to
come to a timely understanding with him. But the
warning proved vain, and blinded by their revengeful
feelings towards the conquered peasants, they forgot
to guard against the revenge of a fettered King.
Dissimulation had been the result of the mor
tifications to which Eichard had been subjected, and
he played his game wonderfully well. Once, indeed,
he was premature in his action, and the confederated
Lords triumphed, and displayed their triumph, it
would appear, in a rather unseemly and most in
judicious manner. A second time, however, Eichard
gained his independence by a mere exertion of his
personal will. After waiting for a twelvemonth, in
a great CouncU held after Easter, 1389, he un
expectedly requested his uncle Gloucester to tell him
his age. ' Your Highness,' the Duke replied, ' is in
your twenty-second year.' 'Then,' said the King,
' I must certainly be old enough to manage my own

RICHAED THE SECOND. 153
concerns. I have been longer under the control of
tutors than any ward in my dominions. I thank you,
my lords, for your past services, but do not require
them any longer.' He then demanded the seals from
the Archbishop of York, and the keys of the Exchequer
from the Bishop of Hereford, while the Council was
dismissed. The Eevolution was complete, and thence
forward Eichard was King in fact as well as in name.
The course he adopted was eminently characteristic.
He did not begin by avenging himself on his late
tutors, nor did he seek to inaugurate his new-born
independence by any display of excessive extravagance
or arbitrary notions. He had exhibited his real
views, indeed, on the last point pretty clearly during
his first abortive attempt at emancipation, by the un
constitutional opinions he extorted from the judges.
But he was now studiously moderate and conciliatory.
Seemingly satisfied with the possession of real power,
he showed no present disposition to abuse it. It is
acknowledged by all parties that his government for
several years was nearly unexceptionable. .Could the
past have been obliterated from his memory, and
had not the degeneration of his disposition during
these early years been of too permanent a character,
his reign might have had a very different termination.
But he could not forget, and he would not forgive,
the indignities to which he had been subjected, and
the death or banishment and degradation of his
fa-vourites. His hatred was as deep-rooted as his

154 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
patience and dissimulation were perfect. Little by
little, as he gradually felt his way to his purpose, the
old symptoms of evil reappeared, and the relations
of the King and those against whom he was secretly
plotting became more unfriendly. Buying off some
and intimidating others into ignominious subser
viency, he broke up the old party which had so long,
beneficiaUy in one respect, but in another unwisely
and unnecessarily shackled him, and then he
executed his long-deferred vengeance with a fierce
ness and unrelenting energy equal to the long delay.
He had forgiven nothing, and finding the nation
willing to stand by a stunned and passive spectator,
he set no limits either to his vengeance or to his
arbitrary exercise of power. The fiercer part of his
character had now the entire ascendant; with his
long self-restraint disappeared apparently his former
judgment. He ceased to think of and provide
against the future — he lived only in the present. He
was no longer the mere elegant patron of literature,
the appreciator of Chaucer and Gower, the handsome
and accomplished master and companion of a De
Yere and a De la Pole, — he was the blind despot,
insulting every national feeling, rousing every per
sonal resentment, and destroying every substantial
support to his throne. The reaction from tutelage
had been too great, the suspense of the long-coveted
revenge had been too long for not merely his
moderation, but his common sense. His mind seems

EICHAED THE SECOND. 155
to have given way under the trial and the con
summation. His energy degenerated into mere
violence ; injustice at first indulged in through
revenge became habitual with him ; favouritism and
misgovernment, once scarcely more than symbols of
self-assertion, became his settled policy ; and at last
the man who in former years had seemed to handle
Henry of Bolingbroke as a mere instrument of his
designs, lost at the critical moment aU presence of
mind and all decision, and became a panic-stricken
and helpless prisoner in his cousin's hands — lending
himself with a now hopelessly ignominious humility
to the ceremonial of his own deposition and the eleva
tion of the triumphant House of Lancaster.

156

HENBY THE FOUBTH.
The accession of the House of Lancaster to the
Throne of England ushers in a new epoch in the
history of that country, to which the reign of
Eichard the Second forms a sort of . introduction.
Out of the chaos of personal ambitions and class
aspirations and prejudices which constituted the
main features of the latter reign was gra,dually
evolved during the fifteenth century that type of
society which was to be subjected to the great
Eeligious and Political experiments of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Everybody must feel
that while there is considerable similarity between
some of the great questions which interested and
agitated the public mind during the latter part of
the reign of Edward the Third, and that of Eichard
the Second, and those with which the Tudor period
was mainly occupied, there is also an essential differ
ence in the character of the society to which these
questions were addressed. The period on which we
are now entering ought to supply the history of this
transition, and explain the recurrence of the same

HENEY THE FOUETH. 15,7
problems under such very different conditions of
solution; but unhappily there is no period of our
national history of which we know so little from
authentic and reliable sources of information, and
which has called forth so little discriminating in
dustry on the part of competent students. The
obscurity and uncertainty which attach to the events,
naturaUy also affect to a corresponding extent our
knowledge of the characters of the sovereigns who
occupied the throne during that period, and I may
therefore at once say that the Estimates of them
which I venture to put forth are given with greater
reserve and hesitation than any preceding ones, and
must be received only as the best that I am able to
form under very disadvantageous circumstances.
The Fifteenth Century-, while it was really the
workshop in which the great revolutions of the suc
ceeding centuries were gradually being prepared,
was in itself to the outward eye only a confused
collection of imperfect and abortive essays of work
manship — the first attempts to realise the great
ideas to which the preceding century had given
birth. FuU of interest so far as concerns the subject-
matter of the day, it is also full of seemingly wasted
efforts, and purposes distracted or postponed at the
very moment of their proximate fulfilment. And as
with the Age, so with the Leaders of the Age.
There are plenty of men of ability, but there are few
really g-reat careers, if greatness is to be estimated

158 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
by permanently great achievements. Nor do the
Kings escape from this common imputation of fruit-
lessness. The ablest and greatest seem to have
palpably mistaken their appropriate career, or to
have wilfully stopped short in it, — the one reaUy
feeble sovereign among them is the only complete
character, and his completeness fitted him only for
an entirely different position.
Henry of Bolingbroke, as he was called, from the
place of his birth, had very little in common with
his predecessor except in the power of concealing his
thoughts, and the patience to await opportunities.
But what in Eichard was a constrained and un
natural state of mind, which eventually destroyed
the balance of his understanding altogether, seems
to have been in Henry the natural growth of his
temperament. Of all his predecessors he most re
sembled in several points of character the founder of
the Plantagenet dynasty. He might, perhaps, be
called a reproduction of Henry the Second, without
the intensity of subdued passion which marked that
King, but without also the elevation and breadth of
mind which (after all his faults) recommend his
namesake to our sympathy. Both kings acted always
on deliberate and preconceived plans; neither of
them seems to have had great originality of mind,
yet each studied deeply mankind and events, and
each in his degree profited by his study largely.
Both were studious, and both were fond of consider-

HENEY THU FOUETH. 159
ing and discussing questions of casuistry, as a relax
ation from and a school for their more immediately
practical duties. A well-informed -writer, who was
bom five years before the accession of Henry the
Fourth, declares respecting that king: — 'I have
known in my time that men of great literary attain
ments, who used to enjoy intercourse with him, have
said that he was a man of very great ability, and of
so tenacious a memory that he used to spend great
part of the day in solving and unravelling hard
questions. . . . Let it suffice for future ages to know
that this man was a studious investigator of all
doubtful points of morals, and that, as far as his
hours of rest from the administration of his govern
ment permitted him to be free, he was always eager
in the prosecution of such pursuits.' He is said to
have invited to England a celebrated French lady
and memoir--v?riter, Christine de Pisan, and the care
ful education which he gave to Prince James of
Scotland was of so superior a kind for the age, that
the greatest benefit was conferred on Scotland when
the long-detained prince was at last aUowed to return
to that country. Henry himself is said to have jest
ingly remarked -when the young prince first feU into
his hands, on his voyage to France, that the Scots
might have paid him the compliment of considering^
him as quite as weU fitted to educate the boy as the
French. These tastes and pursuits are only such as
we might have expected from the son of John of

160 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Gaunt. But Henry also resembled his ancestor, the
first Plantagenet king, in another respect, namely,
in his great activity of body as well as of mind. He
was no mere closet student or statesman of the
cabinet. His whole life, untU he was disabled by
disease, was filled with a succession of personal
enterprises, in which the physical exertion must
have been as great as the individual courage was
conspicuous. It must be remembered that his reign
comprises only a very small portion of his life, and
that he came to the throne at the age of thirty-three,
a veteran in body as well as in mind. After the
assumption of the reins of government by Eichard,
he thought it expedient to quit the political scene
for a time, and in September, 1390, he went into
Prussia, and joined the forces that were attacking-
the Pagan King of Lithuania, and distinguished
himself in the battles in that country. He returned
to England about April the 25th following; but on July
the 25th, 1392, he made a second expedition to Prussia
with 300 men, and not meeting with so friendly a
reception from the lords of that country as he ex
pected, he went to Venice, and thence proceeded to
Jerusalem, where he visited the Holy Places as a
pilgrim, and ransomed many Christian captives. In •
, the course of his travels he visited Italy, Austria,
Bohemia, and France, and was again in England in
1397. His bold enterprise in landing at Eavenspurn
in 1399, and his personal attendance, after his acces-

HENEY THE FOUETH. 161
sion, in the campaigns against the Percies, the Scots,
and the Welsh, all attest a physical activity and
energy quite equal to if not beyond that of his mind.
He was personally brave to the extent of rashness,
and what we have already said shows that he had a
considerable amount of enterprise, and of religious
faith, if not of enthusiasm. He never lost his pre
sence of mind, and he seldom lost his temper. He
preserved calmness and coolness in the midst of great
crises, and never took an active part except where
he could do so with effect. But he was as prompt
in action as cautious in acting. He was not un
kindly in his disposition, in the earlier part of his
life, at any rate, and he was sufficiently versed in the
more ornamental accomplishments of the day to hold
his ground with any knight or courtier, wliUe he had
tact enough to catch the humours of the lower
orders. He was a thoroughly capable man, and a
not ill-meaning man. But his character seems, as
far as we can judge, to have been at the bottom cold
and unsympathetic, and as devoid of generous im
pulses- as it was naturaUy free from sinister motives.
Quiet, and probably unconscious selfishness seems to
have been his ruling characteristic, and the circum
stances of his position and life intensified this selfish
ness and made it something more than a passive
quality. From taking good care not to injure or
sacrifice himself, he went on to injure and sacrifice
®thers. His wariness became suspicion, and his
m

162 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
caution degenerated into dissimulation. He stood
in the invidious and dangerous position of the repre
sentative of a cadet branch of the reigning famUy.
Not only was his father the uncle of the King, but
he himself through his mother represented the col
lateral house of Lancaster, which from its origin in
the reign of Henry the Third had been always a sort
of centre of popular feeling, and an object of suspicion
to the Crown. He was brought up among men with
whom their own aggrandisement was the sole object,
and with whom frequently the best path to safety
and position seemed to be the destruction of aU
possible rivals. He thus learnt early the lesson of
distrust of aU men, and dissimulation with all, if not
also of occasional treachery. I speak with some
reserve on this last point, because my materials for
judging are not sufficient or satisfactory for a positive
decision. Much of Henry's conduct during the reign
of Eichard can be explained without attributing to
him more than great reserve and a keen instinct of
self-preservation. He took the field boldly against
the obnoxious favourite De Vere, and acted for some
time with the Duke of Gloucester, being one of the
Lords Appellant forced on Eichard. But he carefully
abstained from any personal disrespect to the King,
and he openly (though vainly) interposed to stop the
execution of Sir Simon Burley, a courtier of the last
reign, who, whatever his demerits, has the recom
mendation of having been selected by the Black

HENEY THE FOUETH. 163
Prince as guardian to his son. A breach, thereupon,
ensued between Henry and his uncle Gloucester, and
he seems to have withdrawn from the counsels of the
party. The King, at any rate, always expressed
friendly feelings towards him, and made from that
time a marked difference in his manner of speaking
of him and Mowbray from that he employed respect
ing the rest of the Lords AppeUant. Fresh mani
festations of favour were displayed towards him
when Eichard assumed his authority in 1389. But
Henry seems to have either somewhat mistrusted
this appearance of favour, or to have felt his position
too difficult a one, and, as we have seen, quitted
England for the next few years. In 1397, however,
we find the King declaring that he acted with his
consent in arresting the Duke of Gloucester. How
far he was compelled to temporise during the suc
ceeding period of undisguised tyranny, we do not
know; he seems to have made no open opposition,
at any rate ; but there can be little doubt that he, as
well as Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, began to ti-emble
lest their own turn was coming, and to believe that
Eichard had never forgiven their former action
against the favourites. It was under these circum
stances that, as Henry said, Mowbray opened his
mind to him, and suggested measures of mutual
protection, and that Henry disclosed the alleged
communication, at the order of the King, in Parlia
ment. How far this was mere self-preservation and

164 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
how far treachery on Henry's part I am unable to
say. His character does not forbid, while it does
not invite, the worse interpretation. He may have
desired to remove a rival in Mowbray, or he may
have only acted on his principle of general distrust
and self-regard, and have considered it necessary for
his own safety to denounce his old coUeague to the
King. The sequel is well known. Eichard, after
pretending to encourage a decision of the truth or
falsehood of the accusation by trial by combat, seized
the opportunity of banishing both peers from Eng
land, — Henry at first only for ten years, afterwards,
it would seem, for life — on the plea that a decision
either way would be injurious to himself from the
connection of both -with the Eoyal blood, and that it
would be dangerous to the peace of England for the
would-be dueUists to continue there in deadly hos
tility to each other. Other offences were added to
justify Norfolk's (at first) heavier sentence, but the
real offence in both was carefully kept out of view.
Next followed the death of Jphn of Gaunt and the
iniquitous confiscation of his property, and then
came the expedition of Henry, nominally to assert
his own rights and rescue the country from the evil
advisers of the Crown — -really, undoubtedly, to make
a stroke (if feasible) for the Crown. His lessons in
casuistry may have led him to distinguish between
absolute and possible intentions, and so justified to
his conscience his disavowal of all designs on the

HENEY THE FOURTH. 165
Crown when he first landed ; but he as well as the
Percies must have known that there was really no
alternative, in dealing with such a man as Eichard,
between his destruction and their own. It is prob
able that the Percies, like Henry, made their policy
wait on the course of events, and though bent on
deposing the King, would have much preferred a
puppet King in a Mortimer, to a clever ruler such as
they knew Henry of Bolingbroke would prove. But
Henry's management and popularity combined proved
too much for them, and they acquiesced, seemingly
with good-will, in his accession.
I have given some idea of what Henry of Boling
broke may have been in himself and as a cadet of the
royal fiimily : we have now to consider his character as
affected and developed by his elevation to the throne.
He had hitherto suffered (though from a different
cause) from the same isolation and want of sympathy
with others to which the position of Kings exposes
them. He was now to suffer in character and feeling
from the want of the recognised position of a
legitimate and undisputed succession. Unlike Henry
the Second, whose succession to the throne had been
a kind of Eestoration, and who thus added to per
sonal qualifications the prestige of accepted authority,
Henry the Fourth was the nominee King of the Par
liament, and his primary object must be to maintain
himself on this Parliamentary throne, and to secure
the succession to his chUdren. Thus he never could

166 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
achieve the independent position of kingship. Every
act of his beyond the walls of Parliament seemed
like a mere exhibition of personal wUl, and every
concession of his within the walls of Parliament
seemed only a natural and inevitable consequence of
the origin of his power. His mind, though strong,
was not sufficiently commanding to master and
impress with awe, though it might sway and manage
his Lords and Commons. There was nothing
striking in his presence, though there was nothing
insignificant or mean. In person he was of the
middle height, but weU-proportioned and compact.
His address was not undignified, and could be when
he chose very pleasing, but he had to court
Parliamentary favour too closely to be able to
maintain altogether the dignity of a King. The
Commons addressed him in language which will
startle the student who has gained his ideas of
deference to the Sovereign from the days of the
Tudors, and he was compeUed generaUy to answer in
a fashion which sounds somewhat humiliating, even
where we are bound to acknowledge its wisdom and
its justice. There was not sufficient natural elevation
in his character to support entirely this deference to
popular demands which seemed, in his case, rather
humiliating than graceful and condescending. He
had not the elements of Eoyal stateliness in his
nature, and his popular manners had outlived their
proper sphere of action — the candidateship for the

HENRY THE FOURTH. 167
Crown, not its possession. StiU, he might have
inspired regard as weU as respect, if it had not been
for other circumstances. Though his policy at
home and abroad was necessarily to a great degree
hampered and disarranged by personal and family
considerations — though he had to struggle for a
throne where he ought to have been governing a
united people and directing a national statesmanship,
he achieved by the force and persistence of his
character, and his unwearied industry and activity,
much more than could have been expected from his
position. At home he crushed every conspiracy, and
though he lived in perpetual hazard from attempts on
his life, he was not driven thereby into passion or
cruelty. Warfare under his auspices assumed a
much more humane and civilised character. The
Eoyal banner, wherever it was raised in the Scotch
wars, was a secure shelter from the worst accom
paniments of war, and in France his captains gave a
noble lesson in humanity to a Duke of Burgundy.
The death of Eichard is a possible, but only a possible
blot on his memory. How and exactly when that
prince died no one can say, but the suspicions
against Henry, though strong, are far from amounting
to proofs. As of former charges against him, we
may say of this, — it is not incompatible with his
character, but it is not the natural deduction from it.
He was for the first six or seven years of his reign,
at any rate, a just, if not perhaps a very popular

168 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
ruler, and though his administration and his
popularity after that time underwent a serious change
for the worse, this was owing rather to the effects of
mental and bodily decay than to any other cause.
Of his foreign policy throughout, a late editor of his
correspondence speaks in terms of high praise. ' It
is impossible,' he says, ' to read and study this
lengthy and almost unbroken series of letters
without coming to the conclusion that [in the
transactions with France and Flanders] the English
were by far the least to blame, and were evidently
actuated by a sincere desire to make peace on
equitable terms ; a desire for which very little credit
can be given to the other side  The whole
correspondence taken together and considered in aU
its details exhibits a new and striking illustration of
one of those numerous perils and disturbances which
rendered uneasy indeed the early years of the reign
of the first monarch of the House of Lancaster;
affording yet another proof of the vigour of the mind
of the man who could pass safely through so m'any
troubles, and at last obtain success; and certainly
not exhibiting his character in a,n unfavourable light
beside that of neighbouring princes of his day.'
But with all this cleverness of administration at
home and abroad, Henry of Bolingbroke was out of
unison with his times in one essential point.
I have spoken of the Lollard movement in its
earlier social and political aspects. It had been

HENEY THE FOUETH. 169
originaUy, it is well known, favoured and protected
by John of Gaunt, and there is reason to believe that
his son had shared in these sympathies. But the
leveUing or democratic tendencies which were
thought to be the fruit of LoUardism, and which
culminated in Wat Tyler's rising, frightened not
only the middle-classes and nobles, but the House of
Lancaster into orthodoxy and sympathy with the
Church. The nobles and middle-classes had by the
commencement of the reign of Henry the Fourth
considerably recovered from their panic. They proved,
indeed, still doctrinally orthodox enough to pass the
statute De Hceretico Gomburendo, which ushered in
an era of intolerance to the death among feUow-
Christians in England; but they were not loth to
copy a page out of the creed of the Lollards, and to
propose to the King a sweeping ecclesiastical reform,
which would have reduced the clergy to a condition
of primitive Christian poverty, and enriched the
King and aU other classes, and provided funds for
the charity of the kingdom, at their expense. But
the House of Lancaster had not moved in this respect
with the nation which had called it to the throne.
Henry had found the advantage of an alliance with
the Church in his struggle with Eichard, who had
most unwisely alienated its affections by his tyranny,
and he therefore entertained an overweening estimate
of the strength and importance of the Church. The
old superstitious feelings of a Plantagenet (which

170 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
had peeped forth in his pUgrimage to Jerusalem)
may have intensified this feeling, and after his
accession he lent himself to the aggrandisement of
the Church, without due regard for the interests of
the State or the -wishes of the people. On this point
he was disposed to be obstinate, and to show self-
assertion in his dealings with Parliament, and, indeed,
there can be little doubt that the Church was saved
by his exertions and resistance from a timely
reformation, if not from a complete spoliation. On
this point Henry was a bigot, and a persecuting
bigot, and, as he urged persecution, the Parliament
and the people became more tolerant towards the
LoUards, and more sympathetic with their teachings.
Instead, then, of becoming the leader and moderator
of what might have been made a great and wise
movement, Henry expended his energies in checking
and repressing it, and while he destroyed his own
popularity, and undermined the position of his
family, ensured the more thorough do-wnfall of the
Church in the succeeding century. The mind which
was equal to the lessons of casuistry was not wide
enough to grasp the bearings of a great and vital
question, — the faculties which were sufficient to
constitute an able administrator, fell short of the
dimensions of genius and of the higher statesmanship.
The personal reign of Henry the Fourth may be
said, in one sense, to terminate with the latter part of
the year 1406. From that time he laboured with

HENEY THE FOUETH. 171
yoke-fellows very simUar in origin and authority to
those which had been imposed on Eichard, though the
semblance of his personal co-operation was kept up
with more outward decency. A painful disease in
the face, which had more or less afflicted him from
a chUd of six years old, seems to have rapidly in
creased, and to have become a sort of leprosy ; and
now to this was added a succession of epileptic fits,
which at last brought him to the grave. Under the
influence of these complaints, his mind became seri
ously weakened, his household expenditure became
so reckless, and his general power of administration
so obviously broke down, that the Parliament and
the Privy Council took decided steps, and after first
curbing his extravagance and the misconduct to
which his weakness had given rise by rigorous
surveillance, at last took the reins of government out
of his hands, in aU but the name, and placed his
eldest son at the head of the Government. Once the
King asserted his authority by dismissing his son
from the CouncU, but the act was the last effort on
the part of the once aU-efficient Bolingbroke, and the
Crown which, as the story goes. Prince Henry took
prematurely from his father's bedside, had reaUy for
several years practically rested on his own head.
Henry the Fourth was not a good man or a great
man, but he possessed qualities which frequently sug
gest, though they do not realise, both one and the
other character. His aims in life cannot be considered

172 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
either entirely praiseworthy or entirely malign. His
virtues were nearly as moderate as his vices. His
inteUect,like his morality, had the type of mediocrity ;
but the mediocrity in the former case was certainly of
a higher type than in the latter. His virtue was too
passive to endure the ordeal of an active career, but
his intellect was strong enough to secure him a
creditable place in the gallery of Kings, We may
say of him as the old gardener says of Eob Eoy in
Scott's novel of that name, — 'There are mony
things ower bad for blessing and ower gude for
banning, like,' — Henry of Bolingbroke,

173

HENBY THE FIFTH.
The historical fate of Henry of Monmouth has been
a strange one. He has long been the darling of
popular fame, first as the actual hero of the battle
of Agincourt, and next as the supposed hero of a
number of juvenile escapades, which met with a por
tion of their deserts in the Justice and the lock-up;
and it is difficult to say in which capacity he is the
more attractive to the popular mind. I always feel
some hesitation in arriving at historical conclusions
opposed to traditional judgments, but I am afraid
that the reputation of Henry, if it is to be supported
at all, must rest on other grounds than these : — that
the glories of his French campaigns, when looked at
with an impartial eye, will appear as little else than
the ephemeral, though brilliant, success of a mistaken
and disastrous policy, and that the youthful delin
quencies which, through the artistic genius of a great
dramatist, have exercised such a charm over the
fancy, if they have any foimdation at all in fact,
formed so insignificant a feature in the early Ufe of
Henry as to be thoroughly misleading, if taken as an

174 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
index of his conduct before he became King of
England. The only facts of his early career about
which we can feel at all certain present a character
so unlike the popular conception, that it seems very
difficult to admit the possibility of there being any
truth in those stories, famUiar to us aU, of the Prince
and his companions ; and if the authority of contem
porary chroniclers induces me to give any ear to them
at aU, I am compeUed to receive them in a very
partial and modified sense. I cannot expect, how
ever, that my readers will, in this case, give credence
to my simple assertion, and a more detaUed account
of the facts is therefore as necessary on this account,
as it is essential to an understanding of what Prince
Henry really was.
To begin with, Harry of Monmouth — as he was
called, from the place of his birth — was not born in
the purple. When Eichard the Second was displaced
by Bolingbroke, Henry was twelve years of age, and
for these twelve years he was merely the heir of a
collateral branch of the royal family, which did not
stand in the immediate order of succession, even
supposing the reigning King should die childless, and
whose pretensions to the succession were not likely
to receive any favour at the hands of the King, nor
could hope much from popular support as long as
the Duke of Gloucester remained alive. He was
therefore from the beginning placed in a position
both secondary and unpromising. It became also a

HENEY THE FIFTH. 175
very invidious and difficult position, when his father
landed in England to subvert the existing govern
ment. Young Harry was then in Ireland, whither he
had been carried by King Eichard (along with young
Humphrey of Gloucester) as a measure of precaution,
becoming thus a sort of hostage for the good beha
viour of his father. Eichard had always treated him
with great kindness, his preference for the young
probably animating his better feelings in this matter.
Henry {who is said to have always retained a grate
ful feeling towards the King) was knighted by him
in Ireland, and under his auspices first witnessed
actual warfare. Even when the news of Bolingbroke's
enterprise reached the King, Eichard accepted with
seeming faith the lad's protestations of his own
innocence, and took no other measure against him
than that of leaving him behind him in Ireland, under
a gentle restraint. The position of Henry, under these
circumstances, must have called for the early exercise
of considerable tact and self-restraint, if he possessed
those qualities, as Eichard's lenient course towards
him seems to imply ; and at any rate, his mind must
have been roused to the consideration of a grave
moral difficulty as to the comparative claims of filial
duty and personal gratitude, and so may have been
schooled at an early age to habits of reflection and
decision. Then came a great change, and he became
all at once the heir-apparent to an established though
stiU precarious Eoyalty. But along with the seduc-

176 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
tive splendour and flatteries of this prominent posi
tion, which might have iuUed his energies into sloth
ful repose, he entered on cares and responsibUities of
no ordinary kind. From a lad he was called on to
co-operate by his presence first and then by his
personal exertions in the maintenance of the newly-
acquired dignity, and he seems to have responded to
this call with alacrity and unwearying industry.
We can trace his career almost continuously from
this point in State correspondence, in the records of
the Privy Council, and in the EoUs of Parliament.
A few extracts will suffice. Henry Percy (Hotspur),
from whom the Prince had been learning the art of
war on the Welsh Borders, teUs the CouncU how the
Commons of the country of North Wales, that is, the
counties of Carnarvon and Merioneth, who have been
before him, have humbly offered their thanks to my
Lord the Prince for the great exertions of his kindness
and goodwiU in procuring their pardon at the hands
of the King. The pardon itself, dated March 10, 1401,
when Henry of Monmouth was only fourteen, states
that it was granted ' of our especial grace, and at the
prayer of our dearest first-born son, Henry, Prince
of Wales.' In March, 1403, the young Prince was
appointed by his father, with the consent of the
Privy Council, Lieutenant of Wales, with fuU powers
of inquiring into offences, of pardoning offenders, of
arraying the King's lieges, and of doing all other
things which he should find necessary. From a letter

HENEY THE FIFTH. 177
to the Privy Council from the Prince himself about
this time, pointing out the necessity of supplies of
money, we learn that he had been compelled to pawn
his own plate and jewels to raise money for the ex
penses of the war. On July the 10th, in the same year,
the King tells the Council that he had received letters
from his son, and information from his messengers,
acquainting him with the gallant and good bearing
of his very dear and well-beloved son, which gave
him very great pleasure. He then commissions them
to pay 1,000L to the Prince for the purpose of en
abling him to keep his soldiers together. Close on
this date came the insurrection of the Percies. His
son joined the King from Wales, and was present at
the battle of Shrewsbury, July the 21st, 1403, where
he was wounded in the face by an arrow.'
Henry returned after the battle to his Welsh lieu
tenancy, and we meet with a series of letters from
him to the King and Privy Council, entering fuUy
on the matters attending the campaigns against
Owen Glendower, and on June the 7th, 1406, we find
an entry in the Eolls of Parliament which may be
taken as a specimen of the estimation in which the
Prince was held by the House of Commons. The
Speaker, in his opening address, made ' a commen
dation of the many exceUences and virtues which
habitually dwelt in the honourable person of the
' According to a contemporary chronicler, he refused to quit the
field, saying, ' If the Prince flies, who will stay to end the battle ? '
N

178 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Prince; and especially, first, of the humility and
obedience which he bears toward our sovereign lord
the King, his father, so that there can be no person
of any degree whatever who entertains or shows more
honour and reverence of humbleness and obedience
to his father than he shows in his honourable person;
secondly, how God hath granted to him and endowed
him with good heart and courage, as much as ever
was needed in any such prince in the world. And,
thirdly [he spoke], of the great virtue which God
hath granted him in an especial manner, that how
soever much he had set his mind upon any important
undertaking to the best of his own judgment, yet for
the great confidence which he placed in his councU,
and in their loyalty, judgment, and discretion, he
would kindly and graciously be influenced by and
conform himself to his councU and their ordinance,
according to what seemed best to them, setting aside
entirely his own will and pleasure ; from which it is
probable that, by the grace of God, very great com
fort and honour and advantage wiU flow hereafter.
For this, the said Commons humbly thank our Lord
Jesus Christ, and they pray for its good continuance.'
This is the first of four successive Parliaments in
which Prince Henry was cordially thanked for his
services, and recommended to the King's favour. He
was now gradually assuming a more and more impor
tant position in the State. On December the 8th,
1406, we find him present at a council at Westminster,

HENEY THE FIFTH. 179
which had met to deliberate on the governance of the
King's household, the extravagance and misman
agement of which had been aUuded to in a gentle
manner by the Commons on the day when they had
used such warm expressions of praise respecting the
Prince. So that whUe we are looking for traces of
the Prince's extravagance, we come instead on com
plaints of that of the King! It appears from an
official entry, that on May the 4th, 1407, the Prince
was retained by the consent of the Council to remain
in attendance on the person of the King, and at his
bidding — an additional proof of the growing disabi
lity of the King and rising influence of young Henry.
A generous proceeding on his part, on December the
2nd, 1407, must not be omitted. On that day, after
receiving a vote of thanks and confldence from the
Commons, 'the said Lord the Prince, most humbly
kneeling, declared to our said Lord the King, and to
all the Estates of Parliament, in respect of the Duke of
York, how that he had understood that divers oblo
quies and detractions had been put forth by certain
evil-disposed persons, to the slander and derogation
of the honourable estate and name of the said Duke.
Wherein the Lord the Prince made declaration for
the said Duke, that if it had not been for his skill
and good advice, himself the said Prince and those
that were with him, would have been in very great
perils and desolation. And he further added, in
behalf of the said Duke, that if he had been one of
N 2

180 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the poorest gentlemen of the realm, wishing to earn
a good name and honour by service, the said Duke
did so in his own person, labour and use his endeavours
to give comfort and courage to all others who were
of the said company; and that in all his actions
he is a true and valiant knight.' Edward, Duke of
York, whom Henry thus generously vindicated, was
the ' Aumerle ' {i.e. Albemarle) of Shakespeare, an
old favourite of Eichard's, and had been engaged
rather discreditably in plots against Henry the Fourth
in the early part of the reign. Prince Henry, how
ever, continued to have confldence in him after his
own accession to the Crown ; for in the second year
of his reign he made a declaration in Parliament in
his favour, in order to remove the attainder which
had been passed against him by Henry the Fourth,
and trusted him even after the treason of the Duke's
brother Eichard, Earl of Cambridge. The Duke
feU fighting by his side in the battle of Agincourt.
From this period Henry was either occupied with
Welsh affairs (military and civil) or present at Coun
cils in London, and we see him a prominent mem
ber of the Privy Council, of which we find him acting
as President in July, 1408. On February the 1st,
1409, the custody of the Earl of March and his brother
was given to him ; early in the same year he was
appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable
of Dover for life, with a salary of 300L a year, and
on March the 18th, 1410, Captain of Calais. In the

HENEY THE FIFTH. 181
Parliament of the year 1410 we find a petition of the
Commons reciting that a statute of that year, to
prevent malicious prosecutions and secret indictments,
was made by the King's grace, par la hone mediation
de leur redoute Seigneur le Prince. During the June
and July of this year we find the Prince constantly
acting as President of the Privy Council, and as such
actively engaged in all the leading affairs of the
State ; and this is the more remarkable, as it is to
June the 23rd that is assigned by Stowe a riot in East-
cheap (mentioned also in the ' Chronicle of London '),
in which, however, not the Prince, but the Lords
Thomas and John, his brothers, are said to have
been concerned, and which was put down by the
Mayor and Sheriffs. The King is stated by Stowe to
have been very angry at the conduct of the citizens,
but to have been appeased on their explanations to
' WiUiam Gascoigne, Chief Justice.' The only thing
to connect Prince Henry with this transaction is the
fact that the King had made him on March the 18th
preceding a gran t of the mansion of Coldharbour,
near Eastcheap ; while to make the matter more con
tradictory still, it is stated by the writers who attri
bute excesses to Prince Henry, that in consequence of
these he was displaced in his seat at the Council by
his brother Thomas, one of the rioters on this occa
sion! In November, 1411, another Parliament as
sembled, and it appears from an entry in the Eolls,
that the King had taken in Ul-part some of the pro-

182 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
ceedings of the Commons, but on their prayer de
clared them to be his loyal and faithful subjects. It
is clear that the jealousy of the King at the trans
ference of the powers of Government from his own
hands to those of the Prince and Council was rapidly
increasing. Prince Henry's house appears to have
become the resort of a large part of the nobility and
great men, despatches from foreign governments
were addressed to him, and his name was associated
with that of the King in public acts. An application
had been made to the Prince (in his capacity of alter
ego to the King) that very year by the Duke of
Burgundy for aid against the Orleanist party in
France, and a force was dispatched under the com
mand of the Earl of Arundel, Sir John Oldcastle
(Lord Cobham in right of his wife), and other
friends of the Prince. There had been a treaty of
marriage for the Prince with the house of Burgundy,
and Henry appears to have always had a strong
appreciation of the importance to England of the
Burgundian alliance. The expedition culminated in
the victory of St. Cloud (in November), after which
Arundel and Cobham showed their humanity by
drawing themselves up in battle array to protect
their prisoners from the vengeance of the Duke of
Burgundy. Between .this time and the spring of the
following year, a change seems to have taken place
in the counsels of the English King. In May 1412,
a treaty was contracted with the Orleanist party.

HENEY THE FIFTH. 183
and on August the 25th the Lord Thomas, who had
been created Duke of Clarence on July the 9th, was
sent to France with a force to co-operate against Bur
gundy. As far as we can ascertain, a party hostile
to the Prince (according to one account, aided by
his stepmother) had persuaded the King, who was
terribly weakened in mind and body by his epileptic
fits, that his eldest son was seeking to dethrone him,
and had induced him to assert his authority by chan
ging sides in the French civil wars. Prince Henry
appears to have been accused during this year of ap
propriating to his own use money given him for the
payment of the garrison of Calais. In the minutes of
the Privy Council between July and September (1412)
this slander is referred to, and stated to be disproved
by two roUs of paper which the Prince had sent to the
Council; and letters were ordered to be written under
the Privy Seal vindicating the Prince's conduct. The
real fact was, that at this time there was due to the
Prince for Calais a very large sum of money. What
ever may have been the exact occasion of the quarrel
between father and son, it appears from the Eecords
that on February the 18th, 1412 (while the negotia
tions with the Orleanist party were going on), Prince
Henry had ceased to be of the Privy Council, between
600?. and 7001. being then paid to him for his labours
and costs while he was a counciUor. Probably the
displeasure of the King -with his Parliament in the
preceding December marks the beginning of this

184 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
family estrangement. The ' Chronicle of London ' tells
us that, ' on the last day of June, the Prince came to
London with much people and gentles, and remained
in the Bishop of Durham's house till July the 11th;
and the King, who was then at St. John's House, re
moved to the Bishop of London's palace, and thence
to his house at Eotherhithe.' And, again, under Sep
tember the 23rd, it records that ' Prince Henry came
to the Council with a huge people.' Everything seems
to indicate that there had been a great political crisis,
in which the King had resumed the reins of govern
ment, and the Prince had been supported against
him by the people, high and low.
On March the 20th following Henry the Fourth
died, and the Prince, who had so long governed in
his name, became actual King of England. Of the
general tone of his life and character as Prince the
records I have quoted seem to leave no doubt. It
oilly remains to say that some of the statements im
puting to him a wUd and reckless life during that
period are found in the writings of contemporaries,
composed very soon after the aUeged events. The
only way of escaping from the difficulty, is by sup
posing that these statements represent the slanders
spread abroad by the party which, in the last year of
the King's reign, succeeded in removing him from
the Privy Council. They may have been founded on
some unguarded actions of Prince Henry — they cer^^
tainly can only be received as distortions, more or

HENEY THE FIFTH. 185
less, of the real facts. It is possible that the whole
originated in the fact of Prince Henry's early friend
ship with Sir John Oldcastle, who became hateful to
the clergy (the chroniclers of the day) on account of
his LoUardism, and whose character has suffered
from calumny stiU more grossly in connection with
those very excesses imputed to the Prince. If the
gallant, religious Oldcastle — the Havelock of his
day — could be transformed into the prototype of
Falstaff, we need wonder at no perversions of histori
cal facts.
The character of Henry, as it presents itself to us
in the foregoing records, is that of a man of resolute
nature, self-reliant, and prompt of decision, but not
presumptuous or precipitate ; marked by strong good
sense, and yet a generous and compassionate spirit,
and also tinged far more than is usual at such an
early age with a strong feeling of religious duty and
moral responsibility. His reference in his letters of
all his achievements and trials to the superintending
will of God is too habitual, and made in too earnest
and natural a manner, for us to regard it as mere
decent verbiage. His character seems to have al
ready possessed sufficient force to make a deep im
pression on the leading men of the day, and on the
constituted authorities of the realm, and to have
inspired the one with respect, the other with implicit
confidence. Nor does his conduct after his accession
to the throne alter this estimate in any material

186 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
point. In one case, indeed, his kindly feeling and
attachment to his associates in war and peace gave
way before the stronger infiuence of religious fanati
cism. Although he had been so much the companion
of the Lollard Oldcastle, Henry appears to have
always entertained a strong dislike to the Lollards.
The tone of his mind in this respect harmonised
with that of his father, and his love of administra
tion and his military sense of order and authority
were both probably outraged by the opinions attri
buted to these semi-religious, semi-social reformers.
He had joined the Peers in a petition against them
as early as December, 1406, and when he became
King, he seems to have allowed himself, under the
influence of the higher clergy, to believe anything
almost against them as heretics and rebels. He
tried his personal influence with Oldcastle, and his
powers of argument, before abandoning him to his
enemies, but after this I cannot find that he dis
played any deep sympathy in his fate. There was a
hardness of character induced on occasions by his
religious zeal, which was also engendered on other
occasions by his military esprit de corps. He cer
tainly pushed the severities then licensed in warfare
to a very questionable extent. Yet in the face of
the strong testimony borne by French writers to his
just and impartial government of France, and the
protection he accorded to the middle and lower
classes in that country against their feudal oppres-

HENEY THE FIFTH. 187
sors, I cannot caU him harsh or cruel in his general
disposition. At home he was almost worshipped by
the people, and while the nobles were fascinated by
his knightly qualities, and the clergy by his piety
and devotion to the interests of the Church, the
Commons in Parliament seemed willing to incur any
expense and grant any supplies that he declared to
be necessary for the support of the honour of the
country. He had little time for home administration
after his accession to the throne, and the great
mistake of his life — his French wars — never operated
so disastrously as in this respect. His government
would probably have been just, on the whole, but
firm and unbending to the verge, if not beyond it, of
severity. He was capable, indeed, of great gene
rosity, and of considerable acts of leniency. He
released his rival, Mortimer, from his restraint ; he
restored the son of Henry Percy to his ancestral
honours. There was little suspicion or jealousy in
his nature. He was frank and fearless, because he
felt so self-reliant and so capable. He was self-
reliant also, because he had a strong religious faith,
and believed himself only an instrument in the hands
of Providence. From the same source came his
defects. He was severe, and a persecutor from a
strong sense of duty, which overcame all other con
siderations. He had strong sympathies, but he was
more than their master — he was sometimes their
unconscious tyrant. That he believed it his duty,

188 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
as inheriting the throne of Edward the Third, to
engage in the French war, is evident from the
manner in which the clergy, for their own purposes,
played on his mind in this direction. His love of
enterprise, engendered by a life spent in almost
incessant campaigns, was no doubt greatly inflamed
by his abhorrence of the anarchy into which France
seemed falling, and which appeared to summon him
to her rescue, and there is evidence that he con
sidered himself called on by God to punish the sins
of the French people.
The picture of his personal appearance, drawn by
a contemporary who was probably attached to the
royal household in the capacity of chaplain, and who,
at any rate, seems to have had great opportunities
of close personal observation of Henry, appears to
accord with this character. The form of his head is
said to have been spherical, his forehead remarkably
full, the symbol, as the writer observes, of a powerful
mind. His hair was brown, thick, and smooth, and
his nose straight; his face oblong; his complexion
was florid; his eyes were bright, large, and of a
reddish tinge, dove-like when unmoved, but fierce as
those of a lion when he was angered. His teeth
were even and white as snow, his ears graceful and
small, his chin cleft, his neck fair and of a becoming
thickness throughout; his cheeks of a rosy hue in
part, and in part of a delicate whiteness ; his lips of

HENEY THE FIFTH. 189
a vermilion tint, his limbs well formed, and the
bones and sinews of his frame firmly knit together.
His schoolmaster had been his uncle, the celebrated
Cardinal Beaufort, one of the most astute men of the
age, and we have evidence that he imbibed a taste
for learning and literature, and a pleasure in the
society of literary and learned men. While Prince
of Wales, he requested the poet Lydgate to translate
the ' Destruction of Troy,' because he wished the
story to be known generally to high and low. Lyd
gate tells us that the Prince, to avoid the vice of
sloth and idleness, employed himself in exercising
his body in martial plays, according to the instruc
tions of Vegetius. As Prince, also, he became a
patron of the poet Oceleve, who addresses to him
two of his poems. His great love of music and his
proficiency in archery complete the record of his
special tastes and accomplishments. The chaplain
already quoted attributes to him a quiet and dignified
sense of humour and a versatility of mood, which
rather lend countenance to a modified reception of
the stories of Prince Hal. His temper seems to
have been generally bright and cheerful, but to have
been subject to occasional fits of moodiness, the
soldier and man of the world, perhaps, alternating in
his mind with the brooding religious devotee.
Such was Henry of Monmouth, the third hero-king
of the English people, and the noblest representative

190 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of the House of Lancaster,— a Bayard, a Statesman,
and a Fanatic, — the Eoman Catholic Coligny, we
might almost call him, of the fifteenth century, — yet
above all, in everything that he said or did, a King
and an Englishman.

191

HENBY THE SIXTH.
The transition in one generation from one of the
most energetic and successful of our Kings to one of
the feeblest and most unfortunate — from one of the
most self-reliant to one of the most dependent, and
from a Hero- King to a Crowned Monk, is a fact
worthy of some attention in any study of the descent
and degeneration of character. Unlike as Henry of
Monmouth and his son, Henry of Windsor, appear
to be in their developed characters, and although
the dissimilarity became such as to constitute almost
a generic difference, there v^ere some features in the
character of both which exhibit a family likeness,
and a difference of degree rather than of kind.
Henry of Windsor was, indeed, an example of the
effect of constitutional disease on family character
istics. There can be little doubt that he inherited
from his grandfathers on both sides a diseased consti
tution. Henry the Fourth, as we have seen, was a
sufferer from leprosy and epilepsy ; Henry the Fifth is
said by some writers not to have been entirely exempt
frpm the former complaint ; while Charles the Sixth

192 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of France was for a considerable part of his life a
decided maniac. It was from these debUitating
sources that the constitution of the successor to the
hero of Agincourt was derived ; and it was under
conditions and modifications imposed by these, that
whatever there was in his qualities in common with
his father was necessarily developed. There might
be irritability and occasional violence with a cha
racter thus derived — there could scarcely have been
strength or vigour. But, in fact, Henry the Sixth
was not violent at any time, and his mind, when it
became affected, tottered on the brink of idiotcy,
and not of madness. It was rather a general
weakening and stagnation of the bodily and mental
frame than a derangement of either. In the fits of
illness to which he became subject he lost both sense
and memory, and the use of his limbs. When
addressed by a deputation of the Peers he neither
spoke nor moved, nor showed the smallest sign of
inteUigence. The deputation, in the zealous dis
charge of their duty, shook the unfortunate man,
but they excited neither voice nor attention. They
had him moved from one room to another, they
pulled him about, but nothing could rouse him from
his absolute lethargy. He could breathe and eat,
but that was all. Such was the form which his
disease assumed during its greatest though very
transient intensity, and this was the general tendency
of his constitution. At other times, and in the

HENEY THE SIXTH. 193
usual course of his life, he was rational enough in
the ordinary sense of the term, capable of consider
able inteUectual exertion in certain directions, and
of a fair amount of intellectual a.pprehension. He
inherited his father's love of books and learning and
the learned, but the two men must have been
students in a very different spirit. Henry of Mon
mouth read and listened on such subjects with the
keen and active mind of a statesman and, perhaps,
a casuist ; his son read in a passive manner, as a
recluse might read, and imbibed knowledge with the
spirit of a pedagogue and a pious moralist. The
tendency to direct others was reaUy a common
element in both father and son, but in the fifth
Henry it displayed itself in administrative capacity
— ^in the sixth Henry in moral admonitions and a
mild moral supervision. But their practical success
was very unequal in the two. The elder Henry, as
we have seen, gained at an early age the confidence
of all England, as he did, at a later period, of France,
by his judicious government ; for with considerable
frankness of manner at least, and, on the whole, a
fair average amount of actual sincerity and veracity,
joined to a strong sense of duty, he was an expe
rienced man of the world. The younger Henry, as
a monk who knew him well tells us, was ' a ma,n of
pure simplicity of mind, without the least deceit or
falsehood ; he did nothing by trick, he always spoke
tru±h, and performed every promise he made ; he
0

194 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
never knowingly would do an injury to anyone. A
bishop who had been his confessor for ten years,
declared that he had heard nothing wrong confessed
— only venial faults. He disliked the sports and
business of the world — he thought them frivolous,'
and in the simplicity of his heart felt impeUed to
reform that world of men and manners around him
of the real character of which he knew actually
nothing. This was his little enthusiasm — neither
vehement nor ambitious. ' He was fond of exhorting
his friends and visitors, and especiaUy young men,
to avoid vice, to pursue virtue, and to attach them
selves to piety. He was fond of sending epistles of
advice to many of his clergy, fall of moral exhorta-:
tions, to the astonishment of many.' When he saw
some ' young gentlewomen ' dancing in dresses which
he considered immodest, he turned away to his
room, exclaiming, ' Fie ! fie ! for shame ! forsooth
ye be to blame.' Sometimes his reforming tastes
took a more practical and permanent form. It is
weU known that he was the founder of the great
educational establishments of Eton and King's
College, Cambridge, and from the proximity of his
palace to the former place, he took much pleasure in
looking after the schoolboys. ' When the scholars ,
came to Windsor Castle on a visit to some of his
attendants, he was fond of going to them, and
giving to them moral exhortations to be steadily
virtuous. He usuaUy added a present of money.

HENEY THE SIXTH. 195
with this short address, "Be good lads, meek and
docile,.and attend to your religion ; " but he did not
like to see them at Court,., from his dread of seeing
them contaminated by the dissolute example of his
courtiers,' with whom, alas ! it. would appear the
King was conscious he had not been very successful
in his missionary efforts. ' He was very affectionate
to his^ two half-brothers,' Edmund and Jasper Tudor
— the former the father of Henry the Seventh —
' and had them carefully brought up under the most
honest and -virtuous ecclesiastics.' But when the
lads came to stay with him. in the palace, they must
have had a rather constrained and dreary time of it,
for Henry, with aU the pains that the most over
anxious mother could take, exercised a strict sur
veillance over them, keeping watch from his own
windows, lest anything improper should go on in
their apartments.
This didactic spirit>T— which, however modified in
form by the mild and gentle disposition of the King,
must have been oftenfussy and foolish in its j)ractical
exercise — received its peculiar direction from the
religious feelings of Henry, which gave the prevail
ing tone to his chara.cter. There had been a theo
logical taste, if not a devotional tendency, in the
House of Lancaster from John of Gaunt downward.
The son of Edward the Third had been drawn by
it to a patronage of the doctrines and person of
Wickliffe; Henry of Bolingbroke had been led by it
o 2

196 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
to become the zealous friend and champion of the
Eoman Catholic clergy ; whUe in Henry of Mon
mouth the same tone of mind had culminated in
something of the spirit of an old Crusader against
the Albigenses. The feebler and gentler type of his
son's religious zeal was principally shown in the
personal devoutness and mild asceticism of a saint
or cloistered recluse. With an implicit faith in the
Church, he left to its authorised ministers the un
congenial task of persecution, and was satisfied with
being himself a sort of lay monk, and with trying to
make all others like him, and the world itself one
vast religious house for the performance of acts of
piety and devotion. As might be supposed, from
such a temperament and such an intellectual calibre,
the formalities of religion had great weight with
him, and possessed great interest for his mind.
' He loved,' says our monk-panegyrist, ' to read the
Scriptures and the old chronicles. He was assiduous
in prayer. His demeanour at church was peculiarly
reverential ; he would not sit indifferently do-wn, or
walk' about during the service, as was then the
fashion ; but with an uncovered head, and bent
knees, and ' his eyes constantly on his book, or with
his hands raised to heaven, he performed earnestly
his devotions, and meditated deeply within as the
Scriptures were being read. He would not allow
swords or spears to be brought into the church, nor
contracts to be made nor conversations to be carried

HENRY THE SIXTH. 197
on there. His Sundays were always consecrated to
devotion, and to corresponding reading. His other
days were passed in some public business, or in
reading the Scriptures, or history, to which he was
greatly attached.' In his practical life also, however,
he showed that his religion was no mere formal act.
' He was very liberal to the poor ; he never oppressed
those subject to him with immoderate exactions, as
other great men did ; but he was fond of living
among them, as a father among his children. His
kindness of feeling was so great, that hearing one
day that a person of his household had been robbed,
he sent him twenty nobles, with an admonition to
take more care of his property, but with a request
not to prosecute the thief. Coming one day from
St. Alban's to Cripplegate, he saw a quarter of a man
impaled on a stake there for treason. He was greatly
shocked, and exclaimed, " Take it away ! I wUl not
have any Christians so cruelly treated on my ac
count." Having heard that four gentlemen of noble
birth were about to suffer for treason to him, he sent
his pardon with an earnest expedition to the place
of their punishment.' He carried his patience and
forgiveness to great lengths in matters that concerned
himself. In his imprisonment we are told that a
man struck him a violent blow on his neck with a
weapon, meaning to have dashed out his brains or
to have beheaded him. The King bore it patiently,
and only exclaimed, ' Forsooth ! forsooth ! you do

198 ESTIMATilS OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
foully to strike so a king anointed.' 'Forsooth,'
and ' forsooth,' the monk tells ns, were his only
affirmatives, and he frequently rebuked his lords for
their violent oaths. Another person, while he was
in the Tower, stabbed him in the side, and then,
thinking he had killed him, fled away. This was
before Henry's short Eestoration. During that
period the would-be assassin was taken and brought
to the King on his throne, who was then conva
lescent, and who immediately pardoned him. This
last attack, from its being mentioned that Henry
(when he thus acted) was only just getting well,
seems to have occurred not many months before his
actual death, to which it -may have contributed.
'His dress was plain, nor would he wear the up-
pointed horn-like toes then in fashion. He had a
great aversion to the vehement knocking on his doors
when a great man came.'
A nature so simple and good, so gentle and kindly
even in its weakness, so unselfish and so tenderly
humane, even if we have it here represented with
some friendly exa;ggeration, points to a man who,
one might suppose, could not have made an im
placable enemy, and must have commanded love,
and moral if not intellectual respect, from all classes.
His peculiarities might be tiresome and a little
irritating, but proceeding from such a man, could
provoke, one would think, no deep feeling of resent
ment. His kindliness was of a far nobler and more

HENEY THE SIXTH. 199
sterling character than that of Henry the Third,
just in proportion as he was morally so much better
a man. The infiuence exerted by such a disposition
on those around him and on the kingdom at largre
must, one would have supposed, have been a tran-
quilising and beneficent one. Yet We find his reign
one continued succession of violence, anarchy, and
misgovernment. And this was, to a considerable
extent, the result of the one great defect irt the
character of Henry, — his intellectual -weakness, fos
tered, if not produced, by constitutional disease.
This disease was afterwards so marked that it
must have existed even in his early years, though he
is not responsible for the misrule which prevailed
during that period. A child of five months at his
father's death, in his sixth year he was transferred
from the care of a governess to that of Eichard de
Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, a man better fitted to
train up another Henry of Monmouth than such a
child as Henry of Windsor must have been. Some
writers have conjectured that his stern want of
sympathy may have cowed and broken the spirit of
the boy, and so brought on the feebleness of his
subsequent conduct. This hypothesis is chiefly
grounded on the character of the Earl, and on the ap
plication he made for increased powers for correcting
the chUd when he arrived at the age of ten. It seems
that young Henry had then already shown the beset
ting and fatal defect of his character, — a pliabUity in

200 ESTEyLi.TES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the hands, of those who made great professions of
personal devotion to him. Warwick complains that
people have access to him who put into his head
notions of self-importance, and make him insubordi
nate to correction. Of course, no one could expect
in a child of such an age a power to discriminate
between flattery and true friendship ; but unfortu
nately the want of all power of discriminating
character became more palpably and more fatally
evident as Henry grew up ; and by this, and his
equaUy unfortunate tendency to yield in everything
to those in whom he had for the moment confidence,
his virtues became useless, and often even were
turned into instruments of evil and injustice. Then
he was in the hands, during his early years, of
ambitious men, who allowed him no legitimate
means of forming his mind by the observation and
consideration of State affairs, and who employed the
. influence they successively obtained over him to the
advancement of their own selfish interests, or the
overthrow of their personal rivals. Humphrey of
Gloucester may have been . a much better man than
the Cardinal Beaufort ; York and the NevUles may
have been far better statesmen than Suffolk and
Somerset; but the King was the victim of the
personal poUcy of all, and, perhaps necessarily from
his natural feebleness of mind, a mere puppet and
tool in the hands of all. He had no opportunity
given him of strengthening his mind, even if he had

HENRY THE SIXTH. 201
been capable of so doing. Had he married a wife of
good sense and right feeling, something of the evil
might have been remedied ; for a good and clever
adviser, with the opportunities and identity of in
terests of a wife, was all important to such a man.
But Margaret of Anjou, though a woman of ability
and force of character, was overbearing and vindic
tive, narrow-minded, prejudiced, and in her way also
a tool in the hands of others. It was not without
reason that her father warned her, as he did the
King, on this latter point. Fond of directing, her
self, she became the tool of favourites who flattered
her pretensions, just as the King, with his love of
giving advice, was always following the bad advice
of unworthy people about his person. The testimony
of Dr. Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford, who died
before the deposition of Henry, is suggestive on this
point. ' If the King ever becomes angry with any
of his servants for detected falsehood, he forgets the
fault the next day, and praises and obeys the false
counsellor as if he had never done wrong.' The
same writer teUs us that ' many persons told Henry
the Sixth that famous preachers, doctors, by their
preaching against the sins habitual in his Privy
CouncU, caused animosities among the people against
him. Yet the public injuries, and the annual taxes
and tithes, and the alienation of the goods of the
Crown, and the want of justice from the judges
of the Church and kingdom were so manifest and

202 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
SO numerous, that if these preachers wished to have
been silent, the very stones, that is, the popular
multitude, would have cried out.' The Church, the
especial object of Henry's own devoted attachment,
was as corrupt as the State administration. Even
touching the point on which Henry was himself so
earnest in his wishes, ' immoral young men ' were
promoted in the Church, ' whom ' (says the aggrieved
Chancellor) ' I myself knew to be unable to pronounce
Latin, and who did not even receive their own
revenues, but sent their servants to take and spend
them.' Thus the earnest, saint-like King, partly
through absolute intellectual inability, partly through
trusting to others what he ought to have seen to him
self, lent himself to every kind of mal-administration,
and became unconsciously associated in his acts
with falsehood, cruelty, extortion, irreligion, in fact,
with everything that was the most abhorrent to his own
feelings and principles ; and even in his most lucid
periods lent his presence and the sanction of his
apparently willing assent to acts of such doubtful
and contradictory character, as at length to destroy
all feeling of regard and sympathy in a people who
had long clung to him against the ambitious schemes
of the rival House of York. When the Duke of
York first put forward his claims to the crown, the
popular feeling was still so kindly towards Henry,
that the temporary compromise effected was a
necessity for the victorious party; but when Henry

HENRY THE SIXTH. 203
fell at a later period into the hands of his enemies,
he could be paraded through the streets of the
metropolis, -with his legs tied ignominiously under
his horse, without evoking any expression of popular
sympathy or pity. The farce of a good King who
lent his name and seeming assent to all evU was at
last played out, and Henry died in the Tower of
London, with the usual circumstances of mystery
attending a death in that terrible prison, leaving
behind him the curious double reputation of a saint
at whose tomb miracles were said to be worked, and
whom the son of his brother, Edmund Tudor, tried
to induce the Pope to canonise, and of one of the
most worthless sovereigns that has sat on the
English throne. This worthlessness is explained
by the simple fact that he was so much occupied
with his religious services, and with giving moral
advice, that he himself forgot to reign, and was
never really a King at alL

204

EDWABD THE FOUBTH.
Ant attempt to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion
respecting the real conduct and character of Edward
the Fourth, is attended with the difficulty to which
I have already alluded in speaking of the Princes
of the House of Lancaster, and in a stiU higher
degree. Not only are the contemporary accounts
few and meagre in the extreme, as weU as the
materials from other sources ; but these contem
porary chroniclers, with one solitary exception, are
either strong Lancastrians, or did not compose their
histories until after the battle of Bosworth and the
overthrow of the House of York, when it had become
the fashion and their interest to exalt the Lancas
trian interest at the expense of the memory of its
rival. One circumstance, however, has, to some
degree, operated in favour of Edward's personal
fame, — his being the father of Henry the Seventh's
wife and Henry the Eighth's mother. Influenced,
no doubt, by this consideration, the writers of the
Tudor period, while they studiously decry the Yorkist
as opposed to the Lancastrian cause, have been

EDWARD THE FOURTH. 205
induced to soften their censure of the first sovereign
of the former family, and indulge in some panegyric,
whUe not concealing the salient faults of his cha
racter. Thus, in a personal point of -view, we have,
perhaps (between these confiicting infiuences), in
their delineations, as far as they go, a greater ap
proximation to impartiality and the actual truth
than is often met with in contemporary writings.
The difficulty in arriving at an estimate of Edward
does not in fact lie so much in our imperfect know
ledge of the facts of his life and conduct, as in the
task of deducing from these anything like an intel
ligible and consistent character. Never have the
intellectual and sensuous, the masculine and the
voluptuous qualities been presented in any King in
greater intensity and in more strikingly antagonistic
contrast. The King and the Man seem both alike
to resolve themselves into several independent and
thoroughly dissimilar persons, each of whom has his
history and each of whom has left behind a strong
impression on his times ; and so distinct appears to
be the action of each that we are inclined to ask, not
only Which is the real Edward ? but Had the real
Edward any paramount and governing characteristic
at all? And yet all these distinct phases of cha
racter seem to be established on satisfactory evidence,
and the problem appears to have puzzled and misled
contemporaries as much as it does ourselves, and to
have baffled to some extent even the crafty insight

206 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of Louis the Eleventh of France. The present por
trait, therefore,, must be presented with considerable
diffidence and a certain amount of reserve.
The antagonism begins in Edward's physical con
stitution and personal appearance. ' King Edward,'
writes in the early Tudor period Polydore Vergil
(who had excellent means of information, and con
siderable discrimination in availing himself of them),
'was very taU of personage, exceeding the stature
almost of all others, of comely visage, pleasant look,
broad-breasted, the residue even to his feet propor-
tionably correspondent.' Sir Thomas More describes
him similarly as ' a goodly personage, and very
princely to behold ; of visage lovely, of body mighty,
strong and clean made.' That he was handsome to
an uncommon degree all writers concur in stating.
De Comines, who knew him, twice mentions^ that he
was the most beautiful prince he had ever seen, or of
his time; and De Comines, as a counsellor of the
Duke of Burgundy and Louis the Eleventh, had
ample opportunities of making such a comparison.
A story is told, though we do not possess it on con
temporary authority, which is not in itself improb
able, and at any rate Ulustrates the popular tradition
of this personal beauty and attractiveness. He asked
an old lady what she would give him towards the
war, and she replied, ' For thy lovely face thou shalt
have twenty pounds ! ' which was twice as much as
the King expected, who thanked and kissed her.

EDWARD THE FOUETH. 207
This personal beauty was, no doubt, the source of
what we may caU the effeminate side of Edward's
character. It made him a magnificent fop, and with
the natural temperament of which it was the index,
made him also an epicurean of the first water in
every part of his ordinary life, — an unrestrained
glutton, an indolent and self-indulgent voluptuary,
and a reckless and unscrupulous seducer. De Comines
says he indulged himself in a larger share of ease
and pleasure than any prince in his time. To the
same writer it appeared that 'his thoughts were
wholly employed upon the ladies, on hunting, and
on dressing. In his summer's hunting, his custom
was to have tents set up for the ladies, where he
treated them often in- a splendid and magnificent
manner.' He did not confine his entertainments to
the upper- classes ; indeed, it became more and more
his custom, as his life advanced, to mix familiarly
with aU classes. The London citizen Fabyan, writing
at the beginning of the Tudor period, tells us that
' in July, 1481, the King invited the Mayor and part
of the Corporation to a hunt in Waltham Forest,
and feasted them with a rich dinner and wine in a
bower of green boughs, and gave them plenty of
venison at parting. The next month he sent two
harts and six bucks to the wives of the Mayor and
Aldermen with a tun of wine to drink with them.'
His Court was a model of stately magnificence. He
was very fond of music, and very liberal in his allow-

208 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS. '
ance to his minstrels. He took great pleasure in
setting off his fine person to the best advantage, and
in introducing new fashions in dress. His tailor,
Guillemi Pault, had an allowance of a shilling a day,
and five pounds a year from his purse. The new
fashion that he chose for his last State dresses was
to have very full hanging sleeves, like a monk's,
lined with the most sumptuous furs, and so roUed
over his shoulders as to give his tall person an air of
peculiar grandeur. A Sumptuary Act gave him an
opportunity of fixing the distinctive marks according
to dress of every grade of society, from the cloth of
gold of the Eoyal Family, down to the cloth of two
shillings a yard and under of the labourer, servant,
or artificer. For Edward, with all his familiarity
among various classes, was a great stickler for dis
tinctions of rank. Women's Eights, however, were
recognised by a proviso that the Act should not
extend to the wives of any but the two-shillings-a-
yard class. Unless he is belied, he was as curious in
his amatory as in his sumptuous tastes. He used to
say, we are told, that he had three mistresses who
excelled in three distinct properties. One was the
wittiest, another the williest, the third the holiest
harlot in his kingdom.
His great self-indulgence brought on during the
last part of his life a corpulence which injured his
personal appearance, and which also contributed, no
doubt, in a great measure to his premature death

EDWAED THE FOURTH. 209
before he had completed the forty-first year of his
age. It impeded the activity of movement, and
lessened the promptness of action, which once dis
tinguished him, and which sprang, too, from a strong
physique, and an energetic and powerful mind. The
same self-indulgence, at a comparatively early period,
gave a -wrong impression of his capabUities, and so
brought upon the King disappointments and dangers
which probably he would otherwise have avoided.
De Comines deemed him a man of no great insight
or foresight. The Earl of Warwick, while abroad,
gave out, at any rate, that he looked on him as a
very weak prince; and Louis sometimes also pro
fessed to despise him, though he prided himself on
no part of his policy so much as on the warding off
of Edward's invasion of France. The inaction and
seeming indifference of Edward no doubt reaUy
deceived many others, and induced them to mis
count on his inefficiency at the moment of trial.
But in England, at any rate, as time wore on, the
King's real character became better understood, and
it was known that the lion, though slothfuUy cou-
chant, was not sleeping; that although the spring
from repose might be sometimes deferred too long
for safety, yet when it came it was well aimed and
terribly effective. From his father Edward had in
herited, together with good looks and popular man
ners, powers of great bodily activity and endurance,
an imwearied and indomitable energy and persever-
p

210 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
ance, a determined will, a mind of no common
clearness and grasp, and a spirit which, when roused,,
could be as fierce and unrelenting as it was ordi
narily good-natured and humane. When the emer
gency called for the exercise of these powers, the
pleasant indolent voluptuary became another man,
and woe to those who had calculated on his inertia !
Nor was he altogether lost in pleasure-seeking, even
in his most epicurean moods. We find that he dis
tributed persons throughout the country, among the
manors and strongholds, in various places of position,
whose duty it was to watch carefully aU that went
on in the heart of society, and send him regular and
minute accounts of events and of men. These he
carefuUy perused and mastered, and as his memory
was extraordinary, he never forgot what he had thus
learnt, and is said to have acquired an unrivaUed
knowledge of the workings of English society, and
of the characters of individual men throughout the
kingdom. AU England learnt this in time, and all
England was awed into quiet by the knowledge, and
even crouched under his omnipresent administration.
Thus, while he seemed to be a mere trifler and man
of pleasure, he quietly watched the play of the social
chessboard, and if he sometimes delayed his own
decisive move until it was too late, he did so from
over-finesse, rather than from ignorance or indiffer
ence. For, Uke other able men, he rather liked
to disguise his ability in ordinary times, and to

EDWARD THE FOUETH. 211
affect an insouciance and indolence which had no
existence in fact. His confidence in his o-wn re
sources and power of turning the tables suddenly
against an adversary, led him sometimes to let the
dangers accumulate untU the immediate result was a
rather humUiating defeat. He delayed so long any
preparations against the threatened invasion of
Warwick in 1470, and so cooUy neglected the warn
ings of his brother-in-law of Burgundy, that he
found himself in a few days a seemingly hopeless
fugitive, seeking shelter and craving assistance in
the very quarter from which the timely warning had
proceeded. How wonderfuUy his brave spirit sup
ported him under these circumstances, and how
great was the display of wise daring and equally
effective prudence, patience, and self-restraint during
the memorable expedition which ended in his resto
ration to power, nothing but a perusal of the con
temporary and authoritative narrative of that revo
lution which we fortunately possess can convey any
idea of.
The reader, however, of that narrative must go
to its perusal with no idea of finding excessive
scrupulousness on the part of Edward. He was pro
bably not worse, and perhaps better, on the point of
veracity than most of the leading men of his age ;
but he had nothing of the sacred regard for a promise
which marked the character of his rival Henry when
he was left to his own better mind. Edward was not
p2

212 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
an habitual liar or perjurer, but he scrupled at
neither lie nor perjury, nor any other deceit, when
he thought the occasion called for it. He was a very
scrupulous observer of the forms of religion, perhaps
all the more so because he so frequently violated the
substance. He had entered on his reign with a
prejudice against the Church, which had been
generally the supporter of the House of Lancaster,
and during the first ten years of his administration
he seems to have incurred the displeasure of the
ecclesiastics, and to have in one instance, at any rate,
interposed his veto to prevent an enactment which
would, under the cover of common fame, have
placed the life of every suspected LoUard at the
mercy of any personal enemy. But after his
restoration, Edward seems to have felt the necessity
of courting, or at least conciliating the Church, and
we find him praised by clerical writers as an ardent
enemy of heresy, and judicious and liberal patron of
the clergy.
It is a difficult question to answer whether the
government of Edward was reaUy popular. Personally,
as we know, he was popular at the beginning of his
reign, and also for the most part during his second
term of government. His personal and administrative
popularity had certainly declined at the time when
Warwick overthrew him ; the authoritative account
of his restoration already aUuded to leaves no doubt
on this point, especially as relates to the feelings of

EDWAED THE FOURTH. 213
the Londoners, usually his greatest admirers. The
EoUs of Parliament (meagre in the extreme during
this reign) are silent as to any complaints of
grievances, and contain no Act for the redress of any
such. But we know that Edward first introduced the
illegal device of extra-ParUamentary Benevolences,
and the quasi-Parliamentary assembly which, after
his death, invited his brother Eichard to assume the
Crown, speaks out plainly and indignantly against
the system of government under which the nation
had groaned. There probably was a designed ex
aggeration in this statement, in order to support
the deposition of Edward's son, but the account
given of Edward's system of espionage leaves an
impression of terrorism.
The probabUity is that Englishmen bore with much
without complaint through fear of the miseries of
a renewed civil war. The character of the King
himself, and of his government, also was such as to
luU any disposition to resistance. Although he
resorted at times to iUegal means of raising money,
Edward (during his second government) depended
far more on his power of economising on the money
which he obtained in a regular manner. There was
comparatively light, regular taxation during this
period, and the King, who had found an empty
exchequer, left, it is admitted by unfriendly writers,
a very fuU one, and a nation growing rapidly in
wealth and prosperity. This prosperity and wealth

214 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
arose partly from the King's support of municipal
privUeges and patronage of commercial enterprise,
and stiU more from his abstinence from needless
wars, and his discouragement of an habitual warlike
spirit. MostskUful and successful as a soldier as he was,
and flinging himself as he did into any enterprise with
the spirit of a crusader or knight-errant, Edward had
no penchant for war in itself, and disliked and des
pised fruitless and purposeless warfare. Although
nothing would have tended more to establish his
throne for the moment than the reconquest of France,
and though he himself was very desirous of check
ing the increasing power of Louis the Eleventh, he
never would commit himself and the country to such
an undertaking without fair prospects of rapid
success. He landed once in France with a great
army, but it was because he had an assurance from
the Duke of Burgundy of his zealous assistance ; but
on Burgundy failing him altogether, he had no scruple
— ^his courtiers had stUl less — in receiving a sum of
money and an annual payment from Louis, and with
drawing his army. On another occasion, he had
abandoned his preparations for a simUar expedition,
on a like desertion of the Duke of Bretagne. That
he should not care to interfere by arms to prevent
the annexation to the Crown of France of the do
minions of either of these princes may have been a
mistake in policy, according to the views then
generally entertained, but wiU not be imputed as a

EDWARD THE FOURTH. 215
great fault by politicians of the present day. His
foreign policy, indeed, generally wise and successful,
though not ambitious, received some sort of dishonour
in this matter, owing to the belief that his inaction
was caused or assured by the promise which Louis
held out to him of a marriage between the heir to
the French Crown and Edward's eldest daughter ;
and his anger at the breach of this engagement is
said to have contributed to the fatal result of the
King's last illness. But if in this case his wife's
ambition (to which his desire for this match was
attributed) seconded too strongly the restraining
influence of his constitutional love of peace, the
effect of this temperament in general was most
beneficial on the nation at large. A state of peace
became the rule instead of the exception in their
daily life, and the arts and habits of peace rapidly
superseded those of war. And with peace came
Caxton and his printing-press.
Had Edward lived a little longer, this state of
things might have been considerably modified. The
deceit of Louis had not only wounded his pride, but
roused him to a more lively consideration of the
growing power of an astute and unscrupulous rival.
Though pacific, Edward would have been the last
man in his kingdom to aUow himself to subside into
a mere cypher in the eyes of Europe, and his death
probably prevented a struggle in which Louis
might have found out his mistake in playing fast

216 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
and loose with a man of Edward's temperament and
abilities. But Edward seems not to have taken
Death into his calculations on any point. He
felt so fuU of life, that he built up his policy at home
as weU as abroad too much on an assured longevity.
He crushed and he overawed the great nobles, and
raised up a new nobility out of his wife's relations
and the strongest men who would do his service.
But affectionate and devoted husband and father as
he was (notwithstanding his irregularities and
seeming carelessness), he forgot to provide against
the danger to his famUy after his death, from the
animosity of these depressed nobles, and he forgot
that they might find a leader in one of his own
blood. He left a very exceUent and sensible paper
of rules for his eldest son's daUy life and education,
but he forgot to secure his succession by binding it
up with the selfish interests of the most powerful
men. In his self-reliance, he was as reckless in
offending them as he had been in outraging
Warwick's pride ; but he lived to bear the brunt of
Warwick's resentment, and to weather the storm.
In the present instance, the inheritance of hatred
and revenge was bequeathed to a chUd, who paid
forfeit for it with his life. But strange as it may
appear, Edward, though he watched every one, was
too self-confident to be easUy suspicious, and trusted
most men tUl distrust became a manifest necessity.
Edward the Fourth — to condense this estimate

EDWARD THE FOUETH. 217
into a few words — was a shrewd but unscrupulous
man of the world, with the aptitudes and instincts of
a great conqueror and a profound statesman, and
with the sense of responsibUity and self-reliance of a
self-made King, but with the tastes of an easy and
selfish man of pleasure, and with the habits of a
roue.

218

BIGHABD THE THIBD.
The life of Edward the Fifth was so brief and his
reign so entirely nominal, that it would be absurd to
give any estimate of his character as a King of Eng
land. We see him for a moment as a child, a mere
puppet in the hands of others, and then he disappears
from our sight for ever, and neither contemporary
curiosity nor modem research has been able to pene
trate the mystery which surrounds his fate. With
his uncle, who supplanted him on the throne, the case
is very different, and yet we seem to know with cer
tainty nearly as little of Eichard the Third as of his
unfortunate nephew. The writers of the succeeding
period have left us a portrait which is of a monster
rather than a man, and even the genius of a great
dramatist, assuming their narratives as the basis for
his creation, has hardly been able to rise above the
presentment of an unmitigated stage viUain. And
when we endeavour to ascertain the truth or
falsehood of this^ representation, which, notwith
standing occasional scepticism on the part of a few
clever writers, has been generaUy received as true,

RICHARD THE THIED. 219
we find ourselves reduced almost entirely to a choice
between the statements of unfriendly writers and the
inferences as to character which we may think
ourselves justified in drawing from a few ascertained
facts, generaUy isolated, and some of which are not
incapable of more than one interpretation. Under
such circumstances, an estimate of Eichard must be
necessarily imperfect, and on some points open to
doubt, but I think that some leading features in his
character may be ascertained with tolerable certainty.
If the popular judgment has been so violently
unfavourable to Eichard, it is, on the other hand,
almost impossible for any candid and impartial
student of history not to feel disposed to take up the
defence of a man whose memory has been exposed to
such unfriendly criticism. Whether Eichard was the
villain he is said to have been or not, it is quite certain
that his traditional character is drawn by those who
were either violently prejudiced against him, or
interested in blackening his fame,- — the partisans or
flatterers of the prince who had dethroned and slain
him. Denunciations proceeding from such a source
cannot fail to rouse a suspicion that something
might have been said on the other side, if Eichard
had been as fortunate in his biographers as some of
his predecessors, and we seem to be making ourselves
accessories to an act of injustice in adopting without
hesitation evidence so palpably one-sided. This
feeling is confirmed when we find that in one instance

220 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
at least, the change of kings operated in a very
suspicious manner on the tone adopted by an
historical authority. One of the most violent
denouncers of King Eichard is John Eons, the
antiquary and historian, who wrote his history undef
the House of Tudor. But fortunately for us, and
unfortunately for his reputation, we possess a EoU
of the Earls of Warwick, drawn up by him in the
reign of Eichard, one copy of which has escaped
the politic alterations of the author. In this we find
him describing Eichard as 'in his realm [ruling]
full commendably, punishing offenders of his laws^
especially extortioners, and oppressors of his Com
mons, and cherishing those that were virtuous ; by
the which discreet guiding he gat great thanks of
God, and love of all his subjects, rich and poor, and
great laud of the people of aU other lands about
him.' Of course, an historical student wUl do well
to distrust this panegyric as much as the subsequent
denunciation, but the case may serve as a warning
against recei-ving blindly the statements of the Tudor
historians. On the other hand, we must not be
misled by the fact of exceptional injustice having
probably been done to the memory of Eichard by
these historians into the idea that he was in reality
in no respect such a man as they have depicted him,
and that their portrait is a pure invention, rather
than an exaggeration and caricature of the real man.
As far as our present materials enable me to judge,

EICHAED THE THIRD. 221
it seems to me that, quite independently of their
representations, the character of Eichard is not one
which is deserving of much admiration, or even of
high intellectual respect. He was not, indeed, the
exceptionally bad man among his contemporaries
that his Tudor biographers have made him ; he was
probably a better man than several of those whose
reputations have been whitewashed by them, but he
certainly was neither a good man, nor a very wise or
great Sovereign. Indeed, it seems to me, that in
depicting a successful viUain these writers have
unconsciously given him credit for an undue amount
of intellectual capacity.
The first point which requires notice with respect
to Eichard of Gloucester is the shortness of his life.
The popular mind cherishes the idea of an elderly
¦vUlain, but the fact is that Eichard was kiUed before
he had completed his thirty-third year. The actions
of his life are, therefore, those of a young man, and
should be judged in a corresponding light. The
next point is, that the epoch at which he becomes a
responsible agent in the political events of that age
must be placed much later than is popularly imagined,
and that consequently the time of his supposed
political machinations must be limited to a com
paratively few years. There was an interval in age
of ten years between him and his brother Edward,
and on the first accession of the latter to the throne
Eichard was only between eight and nine years old.

222 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS..
He was only just eighteen when he took refuge with
Edward in Flanders, during- the temporary restora
tion of Henry the Sixth, and he had not completed his
nineteenth year when he distinguished himself by
his valour in the decisive battles of Barnet and
Tewkesbury, and when Henry died in the Tower.
He was little more than twenty-six when his brother
George of Clarence died in the same fatal fortress,
and he had not completed his thirty-first year at the
date usually assigned as that of the murder of his
two nephews. Even his undoubtedly premature
appearance on the stage of public life and the natural
precocity of his character can only modify to a certain
extent this consideration of his comparative youth.
His political life can hardly have commenced in
any true sense of the term until after his brother's
restoration in 1471, and twelve years only are there
fore left for the conception and consummation of aU
that villainy which is supposed to have culmina
ted in the murder of the young princes ; and in esti
mating the nature of these machinations, we must
recoUect we are speaking of a life between the ages
of nineteen and thirty-one.
Eichard, the eleventh of the twelve children of
Eichard, Duke of York, was born on the 2nd of Oc
tober, 1452, during the short interval of tranquiUity
which followed the first armed struggle between the
houses of York and Beaufort, — a contest in a later
stage of which he himself perished. And here we

EICHAED THE THIRD. 223
are at once encountered by the calumnies of later
historians, who attribute to him a forbidding personal
deformity. The truth seems to be that Eichard,
uhUke his brothers Edward and George, was puny
in growth and sickly in constitution. His person
was short and slight, and though the limbs were
compactly knit, he was not muscularly strong. His
face, if we may judge from contemporary descriptions
and existing portraits, was very peculiar. It was
rather short than long, but the contrast between the
broad forehead and prominent cheek-bones and the
sunken cheeks gave an appearance of elongation to
the whole face. The upper part of the forehead was
not at aU fuU, but there was a marked protuberance
immediately above the eyebrows. The nose was well
formed, and slightly aquUine, seeming to indicate
sense and fair sagacity. The eyes — the interval
between which was very smaU — seem in the portraits
dreamy and self-centred, and the brow is contracted
into a look of painful and anxious thought, ap
proaching in one portrait to somethuig almost sinister.
The chin is particularly well formed, firm, but
prepossessing; the lips are very thin, and closely
compressed almost into a single line. The auburn
hair falls in thick straight masses on each side of
his face, after the fashion of his brother Edward, and
indeed of that age generaUy. The impression left by
the face is that of deep and anxious brooding, and of
an intensely nervous, but highly-strung organisation.

224 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
It is certainly not a face which inspires confidence,
though it excites an uncomfortable interest. It is
certainly, however, not the face of a vulgar hypocrite
and assassin, any more than it is that of a man of
noble and frank nature. The deformity exaggerated
by his maligners probably really consisted in one
shoulder being rather higher than the other ; he was
certainly not a hunchback in the sense which the
word usuaUy implies. He was active in his habits,
and courageous and enterprising in his spirit in a
more than ordinary degree. His manners, on the
other hand, seem to have been quiet and reserved;
his eyes, as the portraits also testify, are said to have
been habitua,lly mild in expression, but became fierce
and threatening when his passion was once thoroughly
roused. He was courteous and pleasing in his
address, and he appea,rs to have exercised when he
chose an extraordinary fascination over those -with
whom he came in contact. But with one or two
exceptions the power he thus obtained over the minds
of others was transient in its character, and, as a ride,
he seems to have been unable to retain the confidence
which he so strangely gained. Francis, Lord LoveU,
indeed, — 'Lovell our dog' — who appears to have
been a ward of the great Earl of Warwick at the
same time that Eichard was himself under the care
of the King-maker, and about whose ultimate fate
such a mystery hangs, clung to Eichard to the last
with a fidelity worthy of the animal which gave

EICHARD THE THIRD. 225
him his sobriquet. John and Thomas Howard — the
'jockey of Norfolk,' and his gallant son, Surrey,
were also true in the hour of danger, but they had
certainly a strong personal interest in the mainten
ance of the power of Eichard. Most, however, of
the men whom he seemed to have gained for the
time, forsook or betrayed him. The two infamous
Stanleys would probably have betrayed anyone, if
such a course seemed to open a path to their
aggrandisement. But Hastings, whom he is said to
have at one time loved better than any man, and
who stood by him stoutly in the first crisis of his
struggle with the Woodvilles, shook off his friendship
immediately afterwards, and sought his destruction.
Percy, the restored Earl of Northumberland, whom
he honoured and trusted, and who seemed bound to
his interests, betrayed him on the very field of
Bosworth. Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham,
who had seemed his alter ego, deceived him grossly,
though he did not escape a just reward for his
dissimulation and treachery. On the other hand,
Eichard won over Queen Elizabeth WoodvUle, and
all but won her son the Marquis of Dorset, even after
he was publicly credited with the murder of the
Princes; and the young Elizabeth of York would
have been willing, it seems, to accept the hand of
Eichard's son, even if the story is false that she
would gladly have become the wife of Eichard
himself. These, again, all failed him in the hour of
Q

226 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
need. In fact, men appeared to be won and lost
again by him in an equally sudden and incompre
hensible manner. It would almost seem as if Eichard,
while he possessed the power of discovering and
appealing successfully to some strong feeling or
desire in the mind of another, was not capable of
grasping a character as a whole, and through this
imperfect apprehension lost the hold he had at first
gained. Much of his iU-judged violence, and equally
ill-judged confidence, may be traced to this cause.
He destroyed Hastings, whose interests, by a little
judicious moderation and management, might have
been identified with his own ; and he alienated Buck
ingham by his disregard of some strong wish of the
latter, after he had made him only too powerful by
his lavish generosity. The extravagant confidence
he placed in the Stanleys is notorious, and is alone
sufficient to discredit his penetration into character.
If Eichard was a hypocrite and a dissembler, he
certainly was a very poor proficient in his art, for an
impetuous rashness and imprudence of conduct, and
an impatience of difficulties, which made him always
cut the Gordian knot, instead of attempting to
unloose it, appear to be his real characteristics.
Under this influence he was always either too violent
or too generous. It seemed as if he restrained his
nervous excitability, and concealed it under a smiling
face just long enough to give the uncomfortable
impression of a deep and designing nature, and then

RICHARD THE THIRD. 227
gave vent to it, on some momentary occasion, with
the excess and abandon of a man who took no
thought before he acted. It was as if his
judgment was not weU-balanced enough for any
medium between blind confidence and blind violence.
His brother Edward's mind, even when seemingly
palsied by sensual indulgence, was always clear,
healthy, and active ; that of Eichard was perplexed,
morbid, and restless. He gave an impression of
violence and irregularity far beyond the natural
import of his actions. There was scarcely a public
man then alive who might not (as far as his moral
character is concerned) have committed most of the
acts of cruelty attributed to Eichard; but by his
mode of action he gave to them a character of
exceptional atrocity which goes far beyond the actual
fact. And so men came to attribute to him a natural
and systematic cruelty that was really alien to
Eichard's nature, which was quite as much addicted
to an excess of compassion and generosity as to
anything in the opposite direction. He was ac
cordingly credited with nearly all the suspicious
deaths of the period, of several of which he was
certainly innocent.
The young Edward, Henry the Sixth's son, ap
pears to have been kUled in battle, caUing out to his
brother-in-law, Clarence, whom he saw in the opposite
ranks, to save him ; and Eichard had nothing what
ever to do with the event. Henry the Sixth himself
a2

228 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
died, not improbably, though not certainly, from
violence ; but the mere mention of the presence of
Eichard (a lad of eighteen) in the Tower about the
supposed time of the death, is the only piece of evi
dence to connect him with the deed, and as the
Queen and family of Edward were also resident in
the Tower at the same time, this comes to very little.
Clarence's destruction appears, from the indictment
against him, to have been the work of the Queen's
family. The executions of Hastings and of Elvers and
the other members of the WoodviUe family have all
the appearance of acts committed at the instigation
of some sudden feeling of resentment and alarm.
The Woodvilles were only committed to safe custody
as long as it seemed that Hastings was their enemy ;
they were executed after the seizure and execution of
Hastings had probably led to the disclosure of some
more of the facts of their recent plotting with that
nobleman. The death of Hastings was evidently an
act of resentment and alarm on the discovery of the
hostile position he had suddenly assumed. Of the
death of the young Princes it is not easy to speak,
since we really know nothing as to their fate. But
the probability seems to be that something like the
common story actually happened ; and, at any rate,
Eichard must be held responsible for their disappear
ance, since he never produced them, when it became
his manifest interest thus to refute the accusations
against him. That he certainly gave special rewards

RICHAED THE THIED. 229
to the men to whom common opinion afterwards
attributed the deed is a fact of comparatively little
weight, since the most trusted of his confidential
agents would be just those to whom the public would
be likely to assign the commission of the deed ; but
the coincidence of the reward of these persons with
the supposed time of the Princes' deaths is of slightly
more importance. On the other hand, the conduct
of Henry the Seventh to the man who had the charge
of the Tower at the time of the supposed murder,
and to whom the arrangement of the deed was popu
larly attributed, is very strange, on the supposition
that that King believed the accusation against him to
be true. The hypothesis that this aUeged assassin.
Sir James TyrreU, revealed the fact of his complicity
in the murder only on the eve of his subsequent
execution for treason is purely gratuitous, and comes
to nothing, as Henry could always have easily
ascertained if TyrreU had the custody of the Tower
at the time of the alleged murder. On the whole,
we must rest satisfied with the leading facts, that
the Princes disappeared in the autumn of 1483, just
in the crisis of an attempted insurrection in their
favour, and that Eichard (as far as our present
knowledge allows us to speak) never denied that
they were dead, had himself crowned again at York
just about that time, and never produced the boys
when the partisans of Henry of Eichmond proclaimed
their murder, and when their re-appearance would

230 ESTLVIATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
have been a deathblow to the hopes of that pretender,
and a matter of comparatively little risk to himself.
It is probable, then, that Eichard, without premedi
tating their deaths, had them destroyed on a sudden
access of nervous alarm, and thus gave another signal
proof of his fatal impetuosity and want of judgment.
There can be little doubt that the deposition of the
young King Edward was not an unpopular act, and
that Eichard, if he had ruled with ordinary steadiness
and moderation, might have defied all the efforts of
the young King's partisans ; while the boy's existence
was always an obstacle to the claims of Henry of
Eichmond, and of all other possible pretenders. But
by destroying him thus hastily, Eichard not only
threw away his best card and committed an unwise
and unnecessary crime, but broke up the Yorkist
party for ever, and gave a cry to all his adversaries
of which they eagerly availed themselves. It is not
at all impossible that Buckingham (whose preten
sions to the Crown were notorious) made Eichard
his cat's-paw to remove one great obstacle in the
young Princes, and then tried to avail himself of the
odium thus caused to destroy Eichard himself. The
subsequent attempts of Eichard to conciliate Queen
Elizabeth and the Woodvilles, and to unite their
interests with his own, were a vain effort to escape
from the consequences of this and other previous
political blunders.
The public policy and government of Eichard were

EICHARD THE THIED. 231
marked by the same general character of discontinuity,
and excess in opposite directions, which marked his
personal acts. He was always either the ardent re
former and rigid censor of morals, or the lavish
patron and the ostentatious imitator of his brother's
stately magnificence. He did many worthy things,
and corrected several abuses; but his government
was unsystematic, his policy changeable and incon
sistent, and his good and e-vil acts alike intermittent
and disproportionate to the occasion. Such an ad
ministration is even more hostile to a settled state
of society than one of unmixed and consistent evil.
The sense of personal insecurity and the nervous
alarms to which he was himself subject, seemed to
communicate themselves to the kingdom over which
he ruled ; and without any definite causes of complaint
against his government, and with a certain conscious
ness that he was in some respects an able, and,
generaUy, not an iU-disposed ruler, the nation at
large longed for a termination of his reign, and at
length submitted quietly, though without any eager
ness, to the succession of a man of whom they knew
nothing, except that he belonged in some way to the
Eoyal famUy of England, and had relieved them from
a state of painful uncertainty and suspense.
That Eichard was not sufficiently a bad man to be
beyond the pangs of remorse has been deduced from
the fact of the numerous chantries he erected in the
places connected with some of his violent acts to

232 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
pray for his own soul or those of his victims. But this
act was probably as much one of superstition as of
regret, for his nervous temperament seems to have
rendered him particularly sensitive to superstitious
feelings. But a feeling of remorse and a sense of
retribution may have mingled with the bitter agony
with which, according to a tolerably reliable chroni
cler, he was tortured almost to madness on receiving
the news of the death of his only legitimate son, on
the anniversary of the death of his brother Edward.
Eichard was a deeply-affectionate father and a de
voted husband, and there is probably no calumny
more baseless than that which attributes to him the
gradual poisoning of his -wife, soon after the sad
event with which thpy had both been nearly distracted.
Anne was of a consumptive family, and her death was
probably precipitated by that of her son.
On the whole, as far as I can read his character,
Eichard was no deliberate viUain, ^nd not in natural
disposition evil-minded or cruel. But his character
and his acts were the result of a disordered nervous
temperament, and an impatient and unstable will.
As the second man in the State, under a sovereign
(such as his brother Edward) whom he trusted and
looked up to, he might have been an able and high-
minded administrator. When left to himself he had
neither judgment nor self-confidence, and became a
violent man and an unsatisfactory ruler.

233

HENBY THE SEVENTH.
With Henry Tudor, or, as he is generaUy called,
from his title before his accession to the Crown,
Henry of Eichmond, we commence a new era in
English history. He belongs essentiaUy to that
class of founders to which we have aheady alluded,
and of which the Conqueror, Henry the Second, and
Edward the First, were our three previous examples.
But this inauguration of a new state of society was
not merely personal to Henry, or confined to Eng
land, but was the characteristic of the age in general.
The reign of Louis the Eleventh had introduced a
new epoch into French history, and Ferdinand of
Aragon was doing the same for the dominions over
which he ruled, either in his own right or in that of
his wife. AU Europe was passing at very much the
same time from the latest stage of feudalism to a
sort of imperialism — from the government of the
great nobles and the privUeged corporations of the
middle-classes, to the central executive of the Crown,
paramount either over or through the old constitu-
tienal and administrative organisations. Everywhere

234 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Courts and Eoyal Cabinets were superseding char
tered institutions and customary law, and becoming
practically the only authoritative exponents of the
national wishes and policy. With such a revolution
Diplomacy became naturally the chief agent in inter
national relations, to which the prejudices and the
warlike or pacific dispositions of the different popula
tions were quite subordinated, and all statesmanship,
even where it referred to the internal affairs of a
particular country, was conducted in the spirit if not
with a view to the interests of foreign diplomacy.
Unfortunately, what the world thus gained in breadth
of view, and superiority to national habits and
prejudices, it lost in morality. Although the domes
tic statesmanship of the European rulers had not
hitherto presented many features worthy of com
mendation, there was a certain restraining and
modifying influence produced by the fact of the
policy pursued being to a great degree the reflection
of popular feelings, and to a corresponding degree a
subject of interest and consequent supervision on the
part of the people. But the more complicated and
professional character of the statesmanship which
now succeeded was beyond the control and compre
hension of the general public, and a national policy
was replaced by the statecraft of a few royal families,
or a few great ministers. And yet at the same time
that it became thus personal in its character, it lost
that sense of personal responsibUity which is the

HENEY THE SEVENTH. 235
great safeguard of high principle. Men who, if they
had considered their acts in the light of personal
honour, would have disdained to Ue or betray a trust,
did so without scruple when the sense of personality
was merged in a vague professional agency. Their
policy became more personal, while their conscience
became a corporate one — only another expression for
no conscience at aU.
It was into a world which was becoming thus re
volutionised that Henry of Eichmond was born, and
of this new statemanship he became one of the most
striking embodiments. From the first he seemed
predestined to such a position, for he had been
brought up in a cosmopolitan school. He was born
at Pembroke Castle in the early part of the year
1457, a few months after the death of his father,
Edmund Tudor; and his mother, Margaret Beaufort,
was at the date of his birth herself only a child of
fourteen. He was born in the midst of civil convul
sions, and was marked out by his family connections
for a life of vicissitude and danger. On his father's
side he was descended from the Eoyal famUy of
France, on his mother's from that of England. Henry
had, it seems, a better title than he himself knew,
the original legitimisation of the Beauforts having
been without any reservation of royal rights; but
strict titles, however useful in the formal announce
ment of pretensions, were of little use practically in
those days, unless backed by external interest and

236 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
personal character; and Henry stood in that am
biguous position in which circumstances might at
any time give a weight to his person and preten
sions quite irrespective of their exact legitimacy.
His personal appearance as King of England was
somewhat remarkable. The offspring of a premature
marriage, he was sickly in constitution, and probably
had from the first within him the seeds of consump
tion. But his health seemed to improve as he grew
up, and it was not till the last few years of his life
that the badness of his constitution became painfuUy
manifest. He was of full middle height; and his
body 'lean and spare.' His complexion was very
fair ; his eyes were grey, and his hair thin. He was
' of countenance merry and smiling, especially in his
communications,' observes one of the chroniclers.
From several anecdotes we gather that he had a
quiet and dry humour, and that it was not difficult
to excite him to laughter. His bearing on public
occasions was peculiarly engaging, and the popular
cry on his entry into York soon after his accession
was, ' King Henry ! King Henry ! Our Lord pre
serve us that sweet and well-favoured face ! ' The
late Mr. Bergenroth, who recently calendared for
the English Government the State Papers at Siman-
cas bearing on this reign, fuUy confirms this de
meanour of Henry. 'All foreign diplomatists,' he
says, ' who had any business to transact with him,
mention the vivacity of his expression, and especiaUy

HENEY THE SEVENTH. 237
the liveliness of his eyes. He liked to speak French,
of which language he retained a perfect command to
the end of his life. On the whole, he looked more
like a Frenchman than an Englishman. He did not
sympathise with the peculiarly national mode of
thinking, and had imbibed so little of English
prejudice that he did not even hate the Scots.
Henry would have very much liked to employ
foreigners as his servants, but was afraid of hurting
the feelings of his subjects. He looked old for his
years, but, as Pedro de Ayala observes, not older
than might have been expected, considering the
cares and troubles he had undergone.' That Henry
should be un-English in his appearance and to a
considerable extent in his feelings is not to be
wondered at, considering his origin and the circum
stances of his early life. His father was the son of
a Welshman and a Frenchwoman — Queen Catherine,
the widow of Henry the Fifth; he was born in
Wales, and he passed the first fourteen years of his
life in that principality, which then stiU preserved
to a great extent its distinctive customs and feelings.
The next fourteen years, during which his habits
and modes of thought would be mainly formed, he
spent in Britany or in France. It was only at the
expiration of that period, when he had attained an
age at which the character of a man is considered to
be tolerably matured, that he became an inhabitant
of England, and had any opportunity of being sub-

238 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
jected to the influence of English national character
istics ; for the Englishmen with whom he associated
during his residence abroad could give him only the
personal and partial impressions of exUes and con
spirators, and his natural adviser, his uncle Jasper
Tudor, was himself a Welshman, and in a prolonged
exile was losing any English habits and sympathies
which he might have once acquired. It is no small
testimony to Henry's sagacity and superiority to
circumstances, that, with such an early training, he
acquired after his accession such a thorough know
ledge of English feelings as never to outrage them,
or to give his subjects the unpleasant impression
that they were being governed by a foreigner. But
while the bright and cheerful tone of Henry's
temperament made him peculiarly accessible to men
of every grade and of every degree of intelligence
and capacity, the character of his intellect was such
as to guard him against forming hasty impressions
either of men or manners, and to prevent his
falling under the slavery of early and daily associa
tions, while it left to him all the advantages that
might arise from viewing the scene of his future
labours from a distance, and with the independent
eye of a foreigner. His nature, indeed, was not an
emotional one. Bright looks and cheerful manners
even when, a,s in his case, they were genuine symbols
of character, do not necessarily imply excessive
warmth of heart or depth of feeling. It would

HENRY THE SEVENTH. 239
be probably doing injustice to Henry to call him
absolutely unfeeling. His disposition, though not
warm, was generaUy speaking kindly, and he cer
tainly on some occasions displayed strong though
seldom violent emotion. He has been accused of
harshness and neglect in the case of his wife, and
there is no reason to believe that there existed on
his part any ardent feeling towards one who had
been forced on him by the political necessities of his
position. But Mr. Bergenroth, who is no friendly
critic of Henry, declares that he has met with no
instance of harshness or ill-treatment on his part
towards the Queen. ' On aU public occasions,' he
says, ' he showed her much consideration. Some
times even scenes occur which prove that they were
not wanting in cordiality towards one another. The
impression that Queen Elizabeth made upon the
Prior of Santa Cruz was that she was the most noble
woman in England. He thought that she suffered
under great oppression, and led a miserable, cheerless
life. The oppressor, however, was not the King, but
the Countess of Eichmond. . . . Henry,' he con
tinues, ' was not an unfeeling father. He educated
his chUdren with great care. The death of Prince
Arthur was a heavy blow to him.' A contemporary
account, quoted by Mr. James Gairdner in one of his
valuable introductions to the publications under the
authority of the Master of the Eolls, describes the
scene which ensued on the communication of the

240 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
inteUigence to the King by his confessor, and the
sympathy and reciprocal support under their sorrow
between the King and Queen there pourtrayed is
very unequivocal. Mr. Bergenroth notes that,
during the latter part of his life, Henry ' kept Prince
Henry constantly with him. Though he might
have had political reasons for doing so, merely to
prevent any communications taking place between
him and the Spanish party, there is no doubt that
he was also actuated by another and nobler motive,
the wish to form the character and sharpen the
intelligence of his son.' Nor was Henry's severity
towards the Princess Catharine after Arthur's death
(according to a Spanish ambassador who was un
friendly to the King) greater, but less than she
deserved by her conduct. There can, however, be
no doubt that the tendency of Henry's temperament
was towards coldness, and the position in which he
was placed would naturally increase any such dis
position. From his boyhood he had led a life of
danger and distrust. The Prince who for his own
purposes kept him to-day at his Court, might for
those purposes deliver him to-morrow into the hands
of his enemy. The exiles with whom he associated
might at any moment make their peace at home by
betraying his confidence, if not his person. From
the first he was involved in a mesh of political
machinations, and was compeUed to regulate every
tone and act, and every thought, more or less by

HENRY THE SEVENTH. 241
political considerations. That he should be able to
preserve vivacity and cheerfulness under such cir
cumstances is sufficiently astonishing ; and it would
be asking too much from a disposition naturaUy
placid that it should in such a case ripen into frank
ness and generosity.
However little such a temperament may be satis
factory in itself, there can be no doubt that it
harmonised only too weU with that diplomatic tone
of the Age, of which I have already spoken. Henry
was not only born into, but seemed born especially
for, such an epoch in society ; and while his cha
racter was by no means improved in a moral point
of view by his contact with European diplomacy,
in respect of intellectual ability as distinguished
from moral dignity, there are few instances of a
career more remarkable, or, on the whole, more
successful. In Ferdinand of Aragon he had no
contemptible antagonist, indeed one of those master
spirits, to contend on at all equal terms with whom
is no mean achievement. And Henry had to con
duct this contest at great disadvantage. Ferdinand's
great rival was France, which under the recent rule
of Louis the Eleventh had threatened to absorb all
its neighbours. Against this power he had looked
for aid chiefly in an Imperial aUiance, but he was
not unwiUing to employ the co-operation of England,
though along with the other Princes of Europe he
had faUen into the error of undervaluing its power and
K

242 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
resources since the loss of its French provinces and its'
continual civil distractions. To Henry the alliance
of Spain was very important, both in a personal and
a national point of view. If he could cement that
alliance by a marriage, he would be thus introduced
at once into the greatest Marriage-group in Europe,
and consequently obtain a position abroad which
would react oil his precarious position at home, and
give it the stamp of assured legitimacy. At the
same time, it would enable him to keep the power of
France in check without ha-ving recourse himself to
a wkv with that country, which he greatly desired to
avoid. The English crave for revenge on France for
the disastrous wars of the reign of Henry the Sixth
had been revived by the encroaching policy of Louis,
and^ it had become dangerous for any new posses^
sor of the Crown to meet this feeling with a direct
negative. Yet Henry felt that peace was essential
fol: England at this moment, in order to afford time
for the recruiting of her wasted resources, and the
suhsidence of the violent and anarchic feelings which
hiad been created by a long continuance of civil war.
He dreaded on his own account the effect which any
appeal to the old feudal array would have in in
creasing the already too great power of the large
laiidowners ; and, like his ancestor, Henry of Anjou,
he looked upon brute force as the last instrument of
policy to be l-esorted to, and as a very uncertain and
coEtrse weapon. Tlie tendency of a state of warfare.

¦jSENR-r THE -SEVENTH. 243
also, is to suspend or supersede • the operation of
regular law, — and law was with Henry ,(as with
Edward the First) the favourite engine of policy,
whether for right or wrong. If, then, he could
play off Ferdinand against Charles of France, and
Charles against Ferdinand, and yet keep from
going to war himself with either, he would obtain
for England a position which would concUiate public
opinion at home, and create respect abroad. And
in this, in the main, he succeeded. Ferdinand
made him, during this contest of skill, endure not a
few humiliations, to an unwise extent, indeed, for his
own interests ; but Henry avoided war almost en
tirely, and when once he was forced by Ferdinand
into hostilities .with France, he managed to escape
-almost immediately from this imbroglio in a manner
which left him unassaUable on the point of treaty
obligations. The estimation in which he was held
abroad is strongly attested by an Italian envoy.
Like other great diplomatists, he sometimes, indeed,
over-finessed, and towards the close of his life
Ferdinand succeeded in lowering to a certain extent
the great position which he had acquired for Eng
land ; but it was the accident of the death of the Arch
duke Philip, on whom Henry had relied as -his chief
.card against the King of Aragon, and the declining
-health and premature death of Henry himself, rather
than any inferior sagacity in general policy, which
gave an appearance, of disadyantage to the latter.
E 2

244 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
For though pacific in his methods, as far as the
action of this countiy was concerned, and unaggres
sive in his policy, Henry was by no means without
pride and ambition for himself and the nation. His
habit, indeed, of patient endurance, and of regarding
everything in its ultimate rather than its proximate
consequences, which must have been partly consti
tutional, partly induced by the circumstances of his
early Ufe, rendered him insensible to transient per
sonal humUiations, and capable of meanness in the
prosecution of his ulterior ends, which seems almost
incompatible with any sense of personal or royal
dignity, and inconsistent with the possession of an
elevated or even a royal mind. But the fact seems
to be that -with him, as with another of the Tudor
Princes,' the intermediate steps were so subordinated
in his mind to the end, that he dwelt only on the
latter as a gauge of intellectual and moral character,
and felt no sense of degradation in temporary rebuffs
and humiliations, so long as the result placed him on
a vantage-ground ; and his great and elevated gene
ral policy seemed to draw away and absorb in itself
that noble generosity which is usually to be sought
for in personal and special relations.
Closely connected with this pecuUar temperament
were the parsimony And avarice which are usually
considered among the greatest blots in the Kingly
character of Henry the Seventh. No doubt, the habit
" Viz. Elizabeth,

HENEY THE SE^'ENTH. 245
began with the necessities of his early position ; but
it was fostered by the patient calculation and self-
restraint natural to his character. He had learnt
that money was power, and he possessed for a long
time so few other instruments of power, that it is not
wonderful if he clung to this as the principal staff of
his political existence. Through money he could
secure or become independent of false or doubtful
friends, as well as countermine open enemies. Money
was an instrument of corruption, but was time, at any
rate, to its possessor, if he only knew how to use it.
For some time it was through money alone that he
could hope to place himself on a level with the
powerful princes of the Continent,— rich in vast
possessions and in many subjects, but generally very
straitened in pecuniary means. And by the accumu
lation of money in his own hands, he could become
comparatively independent alike of the feudal parlia
ment and of the privileged corporations. Money he
must have, and money he managed to obtain and to
accumulate by just and by unjust means. He pro
cured what he could through the medium of Parlia
ment, as the most regular, legal, and therefore, in his
poiat of view, safest mode. But when the Northern
and Western insurrections warned him that even a
constitutional tax might be unbearable to the mass
of the population, he sought the aid of nominaUy vo
luntary but reaUy forced benevolences from wealthy
individuals, who thus became less dangerous from

246 ESTIMATES OP TEE ENGLISH KINGS.
their diminished wealth, as they increased his own
money-power. But he guarded even this quasi-resort
to irregular mean's by obtaiiiling from a subsequent
Parliainent the very dangerous precedent of a legis
lative enforcement of the so-caUed voluntary promises
of. contribution. By his inquisitions into titles and
iescheats to the Crown, and his heavy fines on great
bffenders against statutes which licence and circum
stances had rendered a dead letter in their class, he
added to the weight of his money-bags, and broke
down stiU more the aristocratic predominance, ' My
lord, ' he said to the Earl of Oxford, who had enter
tained him at his seat with an ostentatious and
illegal display of military retainers, ' I must not suffer
my laws to be broken in my presence ; my Attorney-
General must speak to you about this;' and the
result was a fine of 15,000 marks. One of the
chroniclers tells us, ' He did use his rigour only, as
he said himself, to bring low and abate the high
stomachs of the wild people, nourished and brought
up in seditious factions and civil rebellions, and not
for the greedy desire of riches or hunger of money ; '
and though it is impossible to acquit Henry of the
latter propensity, it is quite certain it was the over-
gro-wth of a much wiser and nobler poUcy. But
although a hoarder, Henry could spend freely when
he thought his dignity or the Occasion demanded it,
and nothing could be mPre stately or magnificent
than the Court pageahts and ceremonial's in which

HENRY THE SEVENTH. ,247
he sought to present before the eyes of his subjects
the greatness of the Eoyal position,
Henry was in general, from temperament more
than humanity, averse to blood-shedding, and thpugh
he was as unscrupulous as Eichard himself, in such
respects, when he deliberately thpught that policy-
demanded it, he generally preferred having recourse
to pecuniary fines, and thus he made the very insur
rections and conspiracies against him not only pay
for their suppression, but become actual sources of
revenue. These latter fines fell on the classes next
below the aristocracy, and tamed the spirit of the
upper middle-classes as effectuaUy as his other policy
did that of the great aristocracy. But with all this
machinery of repression and amercement — jiist pr
unjust — there grew up a sense of general superintend
ence and protection for all classes indifferently, which
gradually made a great impression on the spirit of
the Nation. Even injustice assumed the form of Law,
T-and in the great majority of cases, where the
machinery employed was unjust, though formally
legal, the sufferers were known to be guilty of great
offences against law and justice, if not in this, in
other instances ; and pubUc opinion rather exulted
in the strong hand of the law having reached thpm
at last, than sympathised in the unfairness with
¦which they were treated. Law in name, at least,-
and Order in substance became once more paramount
in England, and it was felt that to offend against

248 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
either would bring down the certain vengeance of
the Executive authority. Everything was systematic,
and the very cheerful placidity of the King's coun
tenance seemed an index of calm and tranquilising
. providence* Content with creating the feeling that
he was inexorable against transgressors of his laws,
Henry often softened the hardness of the punishment
in individual cases by subsequent gifts and prefer
ments; and in all probabUity, in the great outcry
against Empson and Dudley after his death which
destroyed them, we find rather an echo of the feelings
of the upper classes than of the nation at large.
Henry was really his own Minister, and the only man
whom he seems to have admitted to his confidence,
was an ambassador of Ferdinand and IsabeUa, De
Puebla, of whose services he could thus avail himself
without rousing the jealousy of his English subjects.
For it is to the credit of Henry's sagacity, that
without participating in the prejudices of the nation,
he built his government and his policy alike on a
national rather than a personal basis, while he
gradually modified the national sentiment itself, and
educated his people into habits and feelings more
consistent with the advancing civilisation of the
age. Towards the close of his life, of fifty-three years,
he seems to have lost to a great extent the cheer
fulness and equableness of his temper, and to have
exhibited much of the devout asceticism of his

HENEY THE SEVENTH. 249
mother; but the hand of Death was then already
laid upon him, and mind and body were alike giving
way. As men, there is probably little to choose between
Eichard the Third and Henry the Seventh in point
of m.orality. If Eichard destroyed, or intended to
destroy, his nephews, Henry (we can scarcely doubt)
murdered the young Earl of Warwick under the
forms of law, in order to satisfy the demands of
Ferdinand of Aragon for greater security in the
throne with which he was about to ally himself by
marriage. Perkin Warbeck — ^whether he was an
impostor or the real Duke of York — would, it seems,
never have suffered death but for the significant
silence which Ferdinand preserved on an appeal from
Henry as to what should be his fate ; but he was
executed, after an escape which seems to have been
contrived by the King himself, for the purpose of
supplying a new motive for the severity. If Henry
did not commit all the acts of violence which are
attributed to Eichard, his hand was stayed by policy
and temperament, rather than by principle. Neither
was naturaUy cruel or bloodthirsty, but neither had
much moral scruple when passion or poUcy seemed
to incite to a crime, Henry was by far the cleverer
and probably much the more frequent dissembler.
Eeserve and early circumstances had made him such.
But Henry gave to even his crimes the colour and
form of law, while Eichard gave to even his justifiable

^50 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
acts the appearance of irregularity and violence.
Between them as Kings there can be no comparison.
Eichard was one of the most unsatisfactory, , and
Henry one of the most skilful and far-sighted of
our rulers. Eichard reduced the Government and
the Nation to the proportions of parties in a personal
Quarrel ; Henry substituted for personal pretensions
and a protracted civil crisis a national sentiment, a
renovated people, and an assured state of tranquility.
Eichard lost his crown and his life in a vain attemjpt
to s-tem a feudal anarchy ; Henry laid the foundations
of the modern state of English society.

251

HENBY THE EIGHTH.
No. English King has experienced greater -vricissi-
tudes in popular reputation than Henry the Eighth.
Idolised during a large pait of his reign, and retaining
to its close a considerable share of popularity with
the mass of the. population, the character thus be
queathed remained almost a sacred article of faith
-yvith.the ne^^t generation. Under the Stuarts, how
ever, it .became fashionable to disparage the Tudors
and their, poUcy, and the memory of Henry, as the
supposed embodiment of the Tudor characteristics,
became an especial object of hostility. StiU the
national tradition did not entirely succumb to this new
Court theory, and the misconduct and miscarriage of
the .Stuart Princes produced a revulsion in feeling
which found vent in such expressions as that of
Andrew, MarveU :
Ah, Tudor ! ah, Tudor ! of Stuarts enough.
It was only after the fear of a secohd Stuart restor
ation had cordpletely subsided, and when Jacobitism
from a political and religious creed became a senti-

252 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGUSH KINGS.
mental romance of the drawing-room, that the dis
paragement of the Tudors again became fashionable,
and that the character of Henry the Eighth especially
became a subject of unrestrained obloquy, EUzabeth
alone escaped for a time from the effects of this re
action, in consequence of the glories attaching to the
memory of the overthrow of the Spanish Armada,
and the attractive idea of a magnanimous maiden
Queen, But ' the Eoyal Bluebeard ' met -vrith smaU
mercy, and all the romance of his reign attached
itself to the memories of Catharine of Aragon or
Anne Boleyn, each of whom had a band of enthu
siastic admirers and sympathisers, who were united
only on the common ground of abusing the man who
divorced the one and sent the other to the scaffold.
Mr. Sharon Turner was the first to stem this tide of
popular obloquy, and to endeavour to revive the
fading tradition of ' Bluff King Hal ; ' but it was re
served for an abler writer to force the question on
public attention, and to divide thoughtful opinion
somewhat more evenly as to Henry's real character.
Mr. Froude has, perhaps, injured to some extent the
cause for which he pleads by too unqualified an advo
cacy, and by a theory which is too artificial to meet
the misgivings of broad common sense and of in
stinctive morality, and the majority of Englishmen
will probably rest "with greater satisfaction in the
more sober and modified conclusions of Mr, Brewer ;
but it would be doing great injustice to Mr, Froude to

HENEY THE EIGHTH, 253
deny to him the merit of having by confronting
modem opinion -with earlier and contemporary judg
ments, by an appeal to facts against prejudiced and
modem perversions of facts, and by his power of
literary exposition swept away a mass of misleading
errors, and cleared the ground for the reception of a
more faithfal portraiture of his hero-king.
The basis of the character of Henry the Eighth is
his physical constitution, and in no sovereign is a
personal description more essential to a proper under
standing of the man himself. Fortunately, we are
not without the materials for such a portrait, as the
Venetian Envoys at the English Court have in their
communications -to their own Government drawn
more than one sketch of his personal appearance in
the earUer part of his reign, 'His Majesty,' says
Giustinian, ' is twenty-nine years old, and extremely
handsome. Nature could not have done more for him.
He is much handsomer than any other sovereign in
Christendom, a great deal handsomer than the King
of France ; very fair, and his whole frame admirably
proportioned. On hearing that Francis the First
wore a beard, he aUowed his own to grow ; and as it
is reddish, he has now got a beard that looks like
gold. He is very accomplished; a good musician;
composes weU; is a most capital horseman; a fine
jouster; speaks good French, Latin, and Spanish;
is very religious ; hears three masses daily when he
hunts, and sometimes five on other days. He hears

254 ESTIMATpp OP- THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the Office every day in the Queen's chainber, that ;is
to say, vespers and compline. He is very fond of
hunting, and never takes his diversion -without tiring
eight or ten horses, wMch he causes to be stationed
beforehand along the line of country he means tp
take ; and when one is tired he mounts another, and
before he goes home they are aU exhausted. He is
extremely fond of tennis, at which ga;me it is the
prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair
skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.'
Another Venetian reports in 1515, 'His Majesty is
the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on ; above
the usual height ; with an extremely fine calf to his
leg; ,his complexion very fair and bright, -with
auburn hair combed straight and short in the French
fashion ; and a round.face, so very beautiful, that it
would become a pretty woman, his throat being
rather long and thick.' He appears frpm other ac
counts to have been passionately fond of music, and
to have played on the lute, organ, and harpsichord.
Sagudino, secretary to Giustinian, writes in 1517
that he ' remained ten days at Eicjimpnd -with the
Ambassador, and in the evening they, enjoyed hearing
the King play and sing, and seeing him dance and
run at the ring by day, in all which exercises he
acquitted himself divinely.' He drew a better bow
than any of his archers, and (aUowing for, courtly
deference to his person) was an adept in the tUt-yard.
Sagudino describes a joust a-fc which he was present,

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 255
in which the King took part, there being ten knights
on each side, very well mounted, and the horses being
all richly caparisoned and several in cloth of gold.
'Then they began to joust, and continued this sport
for three hours, to the constant sound of trumpets
and drums, the King exceUing aU the others, shiver
ing many lances, and unhorsing one of his opponents..'
In another passage of the ambassadorial despatches
we find a vi-vid description of the magnificent dress
of the English king, when Henry was in the prime
of his life and the height of his prosperity, and when
everything seemed bright and joyous with King and
People. ' After passing the ranks of the bodyguard,
which consisted of 300 halberdiers, with sUver breast
plates, who were all as big as giants, the Ambassador
and his followers were brought to the King. They
found him standing under a canopy of cloth of gold,
leaning against his gUt throne, on which lay a gold
brocade cushion, with the gold sword of State. " He
wore a cap of crimson velvet in the French fashion,
and the brim was looped up aU round with lacets
and gold-enamelled tags. His doublet was in the
Swiss fashion, striped alternately with white and
crimson satin, and his hose were scarlet, and all slashed
from the knee upwards. Very close round his neck
he had a gold collar, from which there hung a rough-
cut diamond, the size of the largest walnut I ever
saw, and to this was suspended a most beautiful
and very large found pearl. His mantle was pf

256 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
purple velvet, lined with white satia, the sleeves
open, with a train more than four Venetian yards
long. This mantle was girt in front like a gown,
•with a thick gold cord, from which there hung large
golden acorns Uke those suspended from a cardinal's
hat; over this mantle was a very handsome gold
coUar, with a pendant of St, George entirely of dia
monds. Beneath the mantle he wore a frock of cloth
of gold, which carried a dagger, and his fingers were
one mass of jewelled rings," '
Such was Henry the Eighth as he appeared to the
eyes of intelligent and observant foreigners, and such,
no doubt, was the general impression of him on
which the estimate of his character prevalent during
the whole Tudor period was based, and which even
the fierce religious controversies and revolutions of
those days faUed to alter materially. Whatever may
have been the changes which time wrought in the
man, we shaU be tolerably safe in taking this picture
as the foundation of an estimate of him, for, as I have
already hinted, it is only through a knowledge of his
physical nature that we can hope to arrive at any
just conception of his intellectual and moral qualities.
The basis of the character of Henry is his powerful
and healthy physique. From this sprang his vigour
of mind ; from this to a great extent was drawn his
moral nature, and by a reference to this his excel
lences and deficiencies, both mental and moral, can
be best explained. With Henry the Seventh the case

niiJNEr THE EIGHTH. 257
had been different ; the basis of character was intel
lectual, aiud the frail bodily constitution only modi
fied and hampered a powerful intellectual organisation.
But the younger Henry felt, thought, and acted as a
strong and healthy, a consciously strong and healthy,
and, therefore, a self-confident and self-reliant, man
would naturally do. He had the magnanimity as
weU as the pride, the self-respect as weU as the vanity
and ostentation, of a magnificent bodily organisation.
His acts and thoughts, both good and evil, seemed
to possess a certain robustness, and his inteUectual
and moral perceptions to have somethiag physical and
bodUy in their composition. The weaker and thinner
fibres of human nature seemed to be strengthened
and widened in him by this physical intermixture,
while the firmer and broader were coarsened. Thus,
while his character escaped from the smallnesses and
mistrust of a feebler organisation, it failed in deli
cacy and considerateness. In the youth and prime
of his life, when health was strong and every wish
appeared to be within his reach, the higher and
nobler features of such a character predominated, and
his truly royal presence represented a truly kingly
character. Hardly any one who has read the pre
ceding accounts of his personal appearance can fail
to recognise a strong family resemblance in the
general portrait to his grandfather, Edward the
Fourth. There are the same personal vanity and
love of display, redeemed from trivial foppery by
s

258 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
dignity of carriage and the stateliness of a reprer
sentative character as head of the State. There was
also in Henry much of the sociable disposition, and
preference for popular tastes and for misceUaneous
intercourse with all classes, which made Edward so
attractive personally to the middle-classes of England.
But the temperament of Henry was not indolent,
like that of his grandfather, and the more habitual
.activity and impetuosity of his spirit gave his man
ners a more boisterous and bluff character in his
famUiar relations than was consistent with the gay
courtliness of Edward. From the same cause he was
more frank and generous in his disposition than the
latter ; but far less consistent and much more inter
mittent in his governing impulses. Between them,
indeed, in this respect, there was almost the difference
between a mature man and a precocious boy. Henry
grew up in body and mind with a premature rapidity
which seemed to make him at eighteen what most
men would have been at five-and-twenty. But his
mind and his character never ripened much beyond
the point thus atta.ined, and his actions have all the
discontinuousness and aU the wilfulness of youth.
When his mind and body at last underwent a change,
it was not towards greater development, but to decay.
Henry the Seventh was the chUd of adversity. Cir
cumstances had made him prematurely old in thought-
fulness, but circumstances also kept his mind in a
constant state of painful discipline, under which it

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 259
was ever receiving new lessons of experience, and
developing more and more under the changing con
ditions of a life of great vicissitudes. But his son
was the chUd of fortune, born in the purple, and the
inheritor of a great legacy of wealth and power and
national prosperity, the result of the long and anxious
labours which had brought the elder Henry to a
premature grave. The greater abandon and higher
spirits of Henry the Eighth sprang nearly as much
from the more fortunate surroundings of his early
Ufe as from his healthy bodUy frame. When the in
creasing infirmities of a naturally bad constitution
affected the mind of the elder Henry, his calm bright
ness sank into melancholy brooding. When the
strong physical constitution of Henry the Eighth
gave way, and disease and bodUy incapacity super
seded the health and activity of his prime, his manU-
ness degenerated into grossness, his self-confidence
and self--will into tyranny, and his boisterous tem
perament towards brutality ; and this personal de
generation had a more serious result in the case of
the son than in that of the father. With Henry the
Seventh the State was a separate entity, to which he
stood in the relation of a wise and patient Mentor.
But his son identified the State with himself so com
pletely, that the Constitution and the national welfare
fluctuated or retrograded with every changing mood
and vicissitude of the King himself. This was at
once the strength and the weakness of England during
s 2

260 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS,
his reign. The nation alternately gained and suf
fered from the alternations in the passions of its head.
While the proud sense of personal dignity of the
Tudor King saved it from national degradation, and
its complete identification in his own mind with
himself gave a certain representative and national
character to his most personal acts, the national
poUcy and the national interests in their turn suffered
by being too often narrowed to personal issues. As
long as Wolsey lived and stood at the right hand of
Henry as his confidential and trusted adviser, the
evils of this too personal government were to a great
degree moderated. Henry, indeed, never aUowed any
administrative act to be carried into execution unless
it had received the sanction of his personal attention;
but he wilUngly listened to Wolsey's advice. He did
so because that Minister, however great inteUectually,
was a man from whom he had not to apprehend any
pretensions to an independent and rival position.
The great nobles complained that they were excluded
from aU posts of real trust, and relegated to mere
ceremonial offices, while the Government was left in
the hands of men of inferior extraction. It was not
ability, but hereditary rank and independent autho
rity that the Tudors were jealous of and distrusted.
They sought for talent, graciously acknowledged its
value, and employed it fearlessly so long as it re
mained a constituent part of their own personal ad
ministration. But they could not tolerate independent

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 261
magnificence even in an inteUectually contemptible
Buckingham, and they struck at it fiercely and re
morselessly. There might be as many channels of
authority as the Constitution or the nation demanded,
but there must be only one independent head of
authority, and the eyes of the nation must be drawn
off to no other centre of attraction. During the first
part of Henry the Eighth's reign this co-ordination
of King and Minister in one great personal policy
was possible, for at home there was only a stately
magnificence, and a personal action operating almost
entirely through the legal channels of the Constitu
tion, though practically autocratic, and abroad the
cautious and subtle, yet bold policy of Wolsey supple
mented and harmonised well with the strong wiU and
sensible instincts of the King, But when diplomacy
became secondary to a great Eeligious Eevolution,
and when the natural position and traditional in
stincts of the Minister became incompatible with the
intense personal wUl of the King, a divergence of ia-
terests seemed to convert a trusted counsellor into a
rival and antagonist, and Wolsey fell in order that
the Government might have in the eyes of the world
but one presiding wiU. He thus lost the confldence,
but scarcely the sympathy of the Sovereign, with
whom he had planned and acted so long, so ably,
and so faithfully. But the confidence which Henry
withdrew from Wolsey he never again bestowed on
any minister. Cromwell or Gardiner might seem to

262 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
stand highest in his favour, but thenceforward the
policy was that of Henry alone, and with its intensi
fied personaUty came a long train of attendant mis
fortunes. From this time the remark of Mr. Brewer
holds good, that the only restraints on the autocracy
of Henry were his own sense of right, and his dread
of unpopularity.
The sense of right was probably much stronger
naturaUy in Henry the Eighth than in his father, but
in the case of the latter it was not so much a sepa
rate standard, to which each act might or might not
be referred, as a constituent part of the whole mental
system, operating almost unconsciously to moderate
and gradually direct his general policy. In Henry
the Eighth, when operative at all, it was very dis
tinctly effective in its action, whUe in other cases its
operation seemed to be suspended entirely, as if it
had no existence. For although the younger Henry
had been educated carefuUy in almost every depart
ment of mind and body, his mind had not been edu
cated as a whole, and whUe the constituent parts
were admirable, the directing power was often very
defective. Thus it was that whim and personal wiU
too often, especially in the latter part of his reign,
took the place of any rule of life, and principle seemed
at the mercy of transient impressions and successive
passions. For though Henry had a great deal of
conscientiousness, he had no fixed and permanent
law of conscience. After the downfall of Wolsey,

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 263
the rule by which he regulated his conduct towards
individuals seemed as fitful as it was purely arbitrary,.
One gust of feeling raised CromweU to power, another
destroyed him; one carried him towards the Ee-
formers, another towards the old Catholic party,,
The very persistence with which he pursued his idea
of a divorce from Catharine of Aragon was not ani
mated so much by any passion for Anne Boleyn, as
by the necessity of obeying and realising an idea
which had gained the ascendant with him. His sen
sual passions were comparatively cold, while the fire
of his will was fierce, and unquenchable even by his
own better instincts. The absence of a matured and
thoroughly disciplined mind produced simUar effects
in all his marriage affairs, and gave an appearance of
inordinate and reckless passion and cruelty to what
was really little else than a spasmodic attempt on
the part of a strong wUl to escape from the conse
quences of its own unwise acts. Of all his wives, not
one can be said to attain to the character of a
really superior woman. None, therefore, had any
chance of preserving an ascendancy over him in the
revulsion of his feelings. He was guided in his
choice by special qualities, and he was constantly
disappointed in the whole nature of the woman, until
at last he was forced to content himself with decorous
mediocrity. Of the more delicate and retiring traits
of a nobler character his own coarsely-fibred nature
cotild form no apprehension. But with masses of

264 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
men of whom he himself was the recognised organic
head, the case was different. Here his personal pride
identified their appreciation of him with his own
self-esteem, and he sought to be popular not only
because he felt that popularity was his strongest
engine of power, but because he sympathised so
strongly with his subjects in their relation to him as
a popular King. Unlike the Stuarts, who succeeded
on the English throne, the Tudor Prince loved his
people as such, and as love begets love, retained to
the very last the affections of the mass of the nation.
The pride of Henry was one which was roused by
rivalry alone ; it fed on the humiliation of the great
and powerful only, and with all others, the bluff
jovialty of his temperament displayed itself in the
most attractive form. This famUiarity in personal
relations extended to petitioners, whose complaints
or requests, instead of being staved off by a host of
intervening ministers and secretaries, found access
to the eye and ear of the King himself, and who
availed themselves of this well-known fact to address
him in a manner which looks very odd in a formal
State document. Thus, among the Warrants to the
Treasurer of the Chainber, signed by the King, we
find one in favour of WiUiam Wynesbury, his Lord
of Misrule, directing the treasurer to pay him Bl.
But annexed to this is a note from the petitioner to
the following effect : — ' If it shall like your Grace to
give me too much, I -wUl give you none again ; and

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 265
if your Grace give me too little, I -will ask more.'
But the King thus famUiarly addressed by one of
mean condition was the same prince with whom the
head of no great man in his kingdom was safe on his
shoulders during the latter part of his reign. With
the Nation, in fact, the case stood thus. The People
had the right and the means of resistance to his will,
but they scarcely ever resisted or wished to do so, till
at last, if they had wished, they had lost the courage
to act. The King had practically the power to be a
tyrant, but with the nation at large he preferred
being an idolised autocrat.
We have reserved to the last the consideration of
those features of the King's character which were
involved in his great controversy with Eome. At
the bottom, no doubt, it was a question of personal
will and royal dignity, but there also entered into it
the element of Henry's own taste for casuistry and
theology. This was the result of a special education
acting on a nature both inquisitive and devout. The
devotional tastes of Margaret Beaufort seemed
blended with the hair-splitting distinctions of a
middle-age schoolman, perhaps derived from his
long lineage of crafty British chieftains. It was
subtlety of thought without refinement of perception ;
implying a peculiarity in the method of thinking
rather than in the thought itself. The capacity for
cultivation, which was inherent in every part of
Henry's nature, made of him in this case a theological

266 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
pedant and an eager controversialist, while his intense
force of character made him a self-sufficient and
intolerant bigot. He took a distinction like a well-
trained ecclesiastical logician, and he enforced it
with a disregard of all opposing logic engendered by
the force of his predominating animal spirits. As
long as the Pope seemed a co-ordinate authority, in
a separate sphere, it flattered Henry's vanity that he
should stand side by side with the ' Most Catholic '
a,nd ' Most Christian ' Kings as the ' Defender of
the Faith.' But the tendency of spiritual as well as of
every other authority in England had for some time
been to merge itself in the civU power, and as Henry
absorbed more and more in himself the functions
of the whole State, the supreme spiritual authority
became almost insensibly vested in him, and at last a
desire to act on the dictates of his own will in a
particular case revealed to him the fact that the Pope
was a rival and controUing authority in his own
domain, instead of a useful orthodox piece of spiritual
machinery in an outlying province. He tried to
make the machine work according to his -wiU, and
when that faUed he resolutely threw it aside, acted
for himself, and became himself the Supreme Head
of the Church. On the question of the Divorce, the
rationale of his conduct probably was that the
scruples as to his marriage with Catharine were kept
alive by Henry the Seventh for ulterior political
purposes, and were overridden by the impetuous willof

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 267
his son, to be again revived by a desire to accomplish
an act which State policy seemed to demand, but
which to his fitful sense of right appeared to require
the additional sanction of a higher moral reason.
The same curious combination of qualities in one
man seems to solve the question as to Henry's
sincerity of character. In accordance with his
predominant feature, he was naturaUy and more
generally frank and truthful ; but on certain occasions,
when his Tudor vein of casuistry seemed to be evoked,
he displayed an amount of dissimulation and double-
dealing which proved that he could be to the full as
unscrupulous in this respect as his politic father,
though the quality of the dissimulation was somewhat
grosser, and probably less effective.
It is extremely difficult to give a just estimate of
the capacity of Henry as a man and a ruler. He was
certainly very capable in many things, and he gives
a general impression of abUity as a ruler, which goes
beyond any deductions that we might be able to
draw from his special acts, and which is possibly
produced by the force of his autocracy itself,
independently of any such acts. We may, however,
perhaps safely say, that he was nobler and better in
his general intentions than in anything that he
actuaUy did. We see the wisdom and sagacity of
the general policy, where we are struck with the iU-
judged and unnecessary violence of much of the
means employed to can-y it into effect. At the same

268 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
time it is the iteration of these violent means which
creates distrust as to the justice of the special act,
more than the circumstances of each act considered
in itself. It may be comparatively easy to show
some plausible cause in each case for the execution
of Buckingham, of More, of Fisher, of Cromwell, of
the descendants of the House of York, and of the
other victims of supposed political necessity ; but the
collective effect of such a number of executions is
fatal to the character of Henry's system of adminis
tration. Whatever may have been the excellence of
the ends proposed, the means chosen must have been
singularly iU-judged to entail the necessity of such
continual bloodshedding. His nature was too un
disciplined, and too much at the mercy of his self-
wUl, and of feelings roused by chance occurrences
to be a safe agent of his own policy. The wisdom of
his original ideas was too often perverted or lost in
the very act of carrying them out. The breach with
Scotland, in the autumn of 1542, when he wasted
with fire and sword for nine days a country which it
had been his studied policy for years to unite with
England in future years, under one govern
ment, is a striking illustration of this want of
statesmanlike foresight in his actions. In fact, if
Henry designed his ends in the spirit of a statesman,
he too often pursued them in the spirit of one who
seeks rather than avoids causes of offence and
opportunities of violence; and though the national

HENRY THE EIGHTH. 269
verdict of those days may have acquitted him of blame
from a feeling of attachment to his person, and a
general appreciation of his intentions and his ability,
modern opinion will probably return a qualified
answer to the same question ; and, while admitting
that he was often wise in his counsel, wiU pronounce
that he was equally often unwise in act.

270

EDWABD THE SIXTH.
Ant estimate of the character of Edward Tudor is
attended -with two difficulties. We have to pro
nounce on a character which a premature death
prevented from attaining its full development, and
yet we have also to deal with an abnormal boyhood,
in which some, at least, of the phases of a more
advanced period of life were artificially anticipated.
We have to consider a character, therefore, which is
neither that of a man nor a boy, but which belongs
to a boy's mind forced into the appearance of fuU
growth. The character of Edward, indeed, whatever
its constituent elements may have been, was in the
form in which it presents itself to our notice the
product of an educational forcing-house, and of a
process in which flavour and colour were to a great
extent sacrificed to early and rapid development.
Henry the Eighth, as I have said, was always to
some extent a grown-up boy, with a mind never
thoroughly developed. Edward, on the contrary,
was never a boy at all, and was caUed upon to
exercise functions for which his understanding had

EDWARD THE SIXTH. 271
only a factitious appearance of competency. His
whole life, therefore, was an unreality, and to divine
the motives of his actions is a task equalled in
difficulty only by that of pronouncing on their moral
significance when ascertained.
The physical constitution of Edward the Sixth
was ill-fltted to endure the forcing process to which
he was thus subjected. The circumstances attending
his birth may have had something to do with this ;
but it is certain that, without possessing any consti
tutional disease, there was a natural weakness, and
a want of vital power, which would have a material
influence in modifying any mental characteristics,
and any family peculiarities which he might have
inherited from his athletic father. According to
the MUanese physician Cardano, who visited Eng
land in the last year of the reign, and who fancied
that he saw a look in Edward's face which fore
told an early death, though he was far from imagin
ing it to be close at hand, the young king in stature
was below the usual size, his complexion was fair,
his eyes grey, his gesture and general aspect sedate
and becoming. The Venetian Ambassador Barbaro
gives us the popular impression respecting him in
the year 1551 : — ' He is of good disposition, and
fiUs the country with the best expectations, because
he is handsome, graceful, of proper size, shows an
inclination to generosity, and begins to wish to
understand what is going on ; and in the exercise of

272 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the mind, and in the study of languages, appears to
excel his companions. He is 14 years of age. This
is what I am able to state about him.' Edward was
born on October the 12th, 1537, and succeeded to
the throne on January the 28th,, 1547, when he
was only nine years of age. He was handsome after
the type of his mother's beauty, i.e. he had regular
features and graceful bearing, but was deficient in
vivacity and expressiveness. He was taken at the
age of six entirely out of the hands of Avomen, and
his mind was delivered over to the educational
direction of some of the most learned scholars of the
day, while his body was at the same time trained in
the ordinary athletic exercises and amusements of
princes and nobles. He exhibited no deficiency, in
any marked degree at any rate in this latter sphere
— his physical powers having probably much more
aptitude than strength. But in the mental school he
seems, making allowance for all flattering exagger
ations, to have manifested considerable inteUectual
power. Acquiring the lighter accompUshments, in
which none of the Tudors were deficient, his own
natural tastes seemed to tend to severer and heavier
studies. His mind, indeed, appears to have been as
narrow as it was intense, but, in such a mere lad,
brought up under such exceptional circumstances, it
is not possible to speak decidedly on this point, as
altered circumstances might have widened his
inteUectual perceptions. He was called upon from

EDWARD THE SIXTH. 273
the first to pronounce on considerations which it was
quite impossible thg-t his mind could properly grasp,
and he, therefore, either became a passive tool in the
hands of those who had the authority or opportunity
of dictating his course; or, if he asserted his inde
pendence at all, did so, not by dealing with the main
issues of the question, but rather by taking exception
and making a stand on some personal prejudice or
conscientious scruple. -For this reference of every
question to certain technical standards of right and
wrong, the character of the studies to which his
mind had been directed naturally disposed him. His
education had been a second Gyropcedia, and his time
had been passed in learning by rote the attributes of
a perfect prince, and in drawing up small codes of
morals, and gravely discussing abstract points of
casuistry. His mind, like his constitution, rather
stagnant and receptive than originative, found its
self-assertion, and whatever it retained of the strong
Tudor personality, in obstinacy and dogged ad
herence to supposed principle or tenacity of supposed
prerogatives, rather than . in any manifestations of
active energy. A curious iUustration of Ms character
in this respect is to be found in the resistance which
he offered to the free exercise of her religious rites by
his sister Mary. For his sisters, as for others whom
he did not dislike, he had a placid regard, and
probably was not undesirous to find some valid
excuse for allowing them freedom of action ; but he
T

274 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
had been so carefuUy imbued with the idea that it
was sin to allow idolatry in the land, that the CouncU,
when the Emperor threatened war unless Mary's
religion was respected, found it very difficult to
persuade their royal pupil to acquiesce in their politic
subterfuges. Dudley, Earl of Warwick, had sug
gested a reference of the question to the Bishops,
Cranmer, Eidley, and Poynet. The Bishops asked,
* if war was inevitable, if the King should persist ?
Being told there was no hope of escaping it, they
begged for a night to consider their answer.' They
were in the main honest and conscientious men, but
they were also official Christians, and ' on the
foUowing morning they gave an opinion, as the
result of their deliberation, that " although to give
licence to sin was sin, yet if all haste possible was
observed, to suffer and -wink at it for a time might be
borne.'" The King was then called in, and the
result of the reference to the Bishops submitted to
him. ' " Are these things so, my Lords ? " said
Edward, turning to them ; " is it lawful by Scripture
to sanction idolatry ? " " There were good Kings in
Scripture, your Majesty," they replied, " who aUowed
the hUl altars, and yet were called good." " We
follow the example of good men," the boy answered,
"when they have done well. We do not foUow them
in evil. David was good, but David seduced
Bathsheba and murdered Uriah. We are not to
imitate David in such deeds as these. Is there no

EDWAED THE SIXTH. 275
better Scripture ? " The Bishops could think of none.
" I am sorry for the realm, then," the King said, " and
sorry for the danger that wiU come of it ; I shall hope
and pray for something better, but the evil thing I
wUl not aUow."' The CouncU, however, seem to
have persuaded him to content himself for the present
with punishing all who attended the Princess's mass
except herself, and meanwhile delayed a positive
answer to the Emperor till they had secured an
aUiance with France which enabled them to set him
at defiance, and renew their persecution of the
Princess with impunity.
Whatever may be said of the judiciousness of
Edward's education in other respects, it is clear that
nothing had been done to quicken or call forth the
warmer feelings and sympathies of a nature naturaUy
inert and undemonstrative on such points. His
purely masculine training had taught him to regard
everything and every relation from the point of duty
and moral rectitude, aU personal considerations
being sunk in a logical conscientiousness. For that
Edward was strictly and even morbidly conscientious,
we see, among other Ulustrations, from the scene
just referred to. He was much attached to his tutors,
but it was in a characteristicaUy calm and inteUectual
manner. Boys are usuaUy demonstrative of feeling
on this point at least, but Edward's estimate of his
tutors is purely intellectual, 'King Edward,'
FuUer tells us, 'used to say of his tutors, that
T 2

276 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Randolph the German spoke honestly. Sir John
Cheke talked seriously. Dr. Coxe soUdly, and Sir
Anthony Cooke weighingly.' So it was with his
juvenUe associates ; he valued them chiefiy on
account of their mental sympathies with him. In
the memoirs of one of them, Jane Dormer, afterwards
Duchess of Feria, we are told that when a chUd of
six or seven, ' while playing at cards with her, he
would say, " Now, Jane, your king is gone, I shall be
good enough for you," and would call her " my Jane,"
their natural dispositions being so correspondent to
each other ; ' and this is one of the warmest personal
demonstrations on his part that I am able to
discover. Yet Edward's attachments, such as they
were, seem to have been deep, though calm, and on
an intellectual basis. When his tutor Cheke was
very dangerously ill. Fuller tells us the King inquired
of his condition carefully every day :—' At last his
physicians told him that there was no hope of his life,'
being given over by them for a dead man. " No,"
said King Edward, " he will not die on this time, for
this morning I begged his life from God in my
prayers, and obtained it," which accordingly came to"
pass, and he soon after, against all expectations,.
wonderfuUy recovered. This was attested by the old
Earl of Huntingdon, bred up in his childhood with
King Edward, unto Sir Thomas Cheke, still surviving,
about 80 years of age.' Was this fanaticism, or
merely an extreme case of Tudor self-confidence, that

EDWAED THE SIXTH. 277
God would, of course, attend to a suit in which he
had interested himself? For of the 'family self-con
fidence Edward possessed a large share, which was
necessarUy fostered most injuriously by the position
in which he was placed. Although really a puppet
in the hands of successive chiefs of his Council, he
had been made from the first to play the part of an
inteUigent and capable man so constantly, that he
naturally believed in the reality of the part assigned
to him. His Journal, consequently, instead of being
a record of bOyish impressions, is a grave statement
of the conduct of his life and the rationale of the
Administration. The selfish policy of the men whp
used his name as a cover for their own wishes and
acts always intruded the young King personally on
the political scene wljenever any important point had
to be achieved, or any serious opposition had to be
overcome. He was thus placed in a position of arti
ficial self-consequence, which could not but influence
his character very unpleasantly.
It was doubtless necessary to be particularly strict
in enforcing the rules of royal etiquette in the case
of a boy whose age might otherwise have been taken
advantage of, but the effects on him of the cere
monial described by a foreign envoy could not have
been good. ' No one was permitted to address him,
not even his sisters, without kneeling to him. ",I
have seen," says Ubaldini, " the Princess Elizabeth
drop on one knee flve times before her brother ere

278 , ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
she took her place." At dinner, if either of his sisters
were permitted to eat with him, she sat on a stool
and cushion at a distance beyond the limits of the
royal dais. Even the lords and gentlemen who
brought in the dishes before dinner were bareheaded,
and knelt down before they placed them on the table.
This custom shocked the French Ambassador and
suite, for in France the office was confined to pages,
who bowed only, and did not kneel,' He was made
the arbiter of the fate of two uncles, and he was
Called upon to lecture a sister much older than him
self on the principles of theology, and to dictate to
her on the rules of her own conscience. Well might
Mary remark, ' Although her good sweet King have
more knowledge than any other of his years, yet it is
not possible that he can be judge of these things.'
The false position in which Edward was thus
placed, joined to his natural self-confidence, unemo
tional temperament, and logical conscientiousness,
affords probably the key to his strange insensibility
to the fate of his uncles Lord Seymour and the Duke
of Somerset, He had been made to enter fully into
the question of the guUt of the former ; his own
personal evidence even had been produced against
Seymour, His self-esteem had been thus artfully
interested in the prosecution, and no doubt he had
come to a logical conclusion that Seymour was guilty.
That which would have pleaded with most lads of
his age in favour of the delinquent — Seymour's secret

EDWAED THE SIXTH. 279
supplies of money to Edward for his personal
gratiflcation — had no weight with such a nature,
when duly interpreted to him, as no doubt it was, as
a mere artiflce of Seymour's for his own selflsh ends.
Any natural love he might possess was far too weak
to stand the test of what seemed to him alike a
logical consequence and a duty, and he sent Seymour
to the block with as little emotion probably as he
would have bestowed on any other State criminal.
After this, his conduct towards Somerset himself,
who had taught his royal nephew thus stoically
to weigh the conflicting claims of cold policy and of
natural affection, is not difficult to explain. With
a far nobler nature than either his brother or his
nephew (as far as the character of the latter had
as yet developed itself), the Protector expiated in his
own person the offence against nature which he had
committed in dipping a boy's hands in the blood of
a relative. But the mischief did not end here. A
reaUy well-disposed and conscientious nature had,
through an unfair advantage taken of a peculiarity
of temperament, been introduced at a most im
pressionable age to a school of politics in which his
father's own character had been ruined, and under
the dictation of which had he lived much longer,
he might himself have reproduced that terrible
history of execution after execution, which only the
hardest political expediency can in any degree
paUiate, and which right feeling and the highest

280 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
statesmanship alike condemn. It is not, indeed, just
to condemn a young Prince for the fofeshadowings
of evil which might never have come to pass, or to
attribute to a cold instinctive craving for blood, what
seems chiefly the result of a too passive sensibility
and a too purely inteUectual education. The inteUect
is, no doubt, an important auxiliary in the determin
ation of moral questions, but it is quite as open to
deception as is the heart, and he who relies, as
Edward did, on the former alone for his rule of
action, is, at least, entitled to the same excuse which
we give to the impulsive errors of a warmer
temperament. Yet the prospect of the possible
eventualities of Edward's career, had he lived to
manhood, is not such as to make us regret his early
death. A strong Tudpr intellect might have guided
his geneial policy rightly, but it is only too probable
that by his death England escaped from an epoch of
cold Augustan terrorism which would have rendered
a name that is now a subject of sentimental interest,
odious in the eyes of a more fortunate posterity.

281

MABY.
If popular reputation were to be the sole guide of our
estimate of a sovereign, Mary Tudor's character -would
be soon depicted, and in the most uninviting colours.
The name of no English sovereign has inspired ia the
minds of generations of Englishmen a greater feel
ing of horror and aversion. It is only in the present
age that any attempt to discriminate between a deep
and deserved censure of several of her public acts,
and a wholesale condemnation of the woman herself,
has been at all widely accepted, and that the terrible
memories of Smithfield have been at aU softened by*
any mitigated view of the character and motives of
the author of those tragedies. Now, however, Pro
testant and Catholic opinion seem to be gravitating
to much the same modified estimate of this unhappy
Queen, and there is something like a common and
harmonious recognition of her merits and her faults.
I cannot introduce Mary better than in the de
scription given of her person and characteristics by
the Venetian Michele, the year before her death,
'Queen Mary,' he writes, 'the daughter of Henry

282 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the Eighth and of his Queen Catharine, daughter of
Ferdinand the CathoUc, King of Aragon, is a princess
of great worth. In her youth she was rendered
unhappy by the events of her mother's divorce, by
the ignominy and threats to which she was exposed
a,fter the change of religion in England — she being
unwiUing to bend to the new one — and by the dangers
to which she was exposed by the Duke of North
umberland, and the riots among the people when she
ascended the throne. She is of short stature, well
made, thin and delicate, and moderately pretty ; her
eyes are so lively that she inspires reverence and
respect, and even fear, wherever she turns them;
nevertheless, she is very short-sighted. Her voice is
deep, almost like that of a man. She understands
five languages, English, Latin, French, Spanish, and
Italian, in which last, however, she does not venture
to discourse. She is also much skUled in ladies'
?work, such as producing all sorts of embroidery -with
the needle. She has a knowledge of music, chiefly
on the lute, on which she plays exceedingly well.
As to the qualities of her mind, it may be said of her
that she is rash, disdainful, and parsimonious rather
than liberal. She is endowed with great humUity
and patience, but withal high-spirited, courageous,
and resolute, having during the whole course of her
adversity been guiltless of any the least approach to
meanness of comportment ; she is, moreover, devout
and staunch in the defence of her religion. Some

MARY. 283
personal infirmities under which she labours are the
causes to her of both public and private affliction.^
To remedy these, recourse is had to frequent blood
letting, and this is the real cause of her paleness, and
the general weakness of her frame. The cabals she
has been exposed to, the evil disposition of the people
towards her, the present poverty and the debt of the
Crown, and her passion for King Philip, from whom
she is doomed to live separate, are so many other
causes of the grief by which she is overwhelmed.
She is, moreover, a prey to the hatred she bears to
my Lady Elizabeth, and which has its source in the
recollection of the wrongs she experienced on account
of her mother, and in the fact that all eyes and
hearts are turned towards my Lady Elizabeth, as
successor to the throne.'
Such did Mary seem to a calm observer, who was
uninfluenced by feelings of either Catholic or Pro
testant fanaticism, and though the portrait is not
quite distinct or consistent on some pohits, such in
the main, there can be little doubt, she actuaUy was.
The general mould of her character was Spanish
rather than English, though some of the Tudor
characteristics are stUl very patent. She had aU
their undaunted courage, aU their unconquerable
persistence, much of their kingly self-respect and
their feeling of moral responsibility as rulers, and of
duty towards tho Nation, apart from any responsibility
to class or individual within that Nation. Her

284 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
natural disposition, so far as we can separate it from
the attitudes into which she was forced by consider
ations of duty to the Church and to God, was milder
than that of her father, and more accessible to warm
and sympathetic feelings than that of her brother.
But in her demeanour she was less graceful than the
latter, and she had few of the social and popular
qualities of the former. Her mind and her manners
were alike stiff and formal, her courtesy was too
ceremonial to be really engaging, and her dignity of
bearing, though it might inspire awe and fear, faUed
to excite admiration, while her rigid and morbid
devoteeism was quite as likely to rouse contempt for
her intellect as respect for her conscientiousness.
But whatever unconciliatory rigidity there may have
been in her original temperament was intensified by
the peculiar circumstances of her life. Her very
conscientiousness was in this respect most unfavour
able to her in a social point of view. Too honest as
weU as too obstinate to conform to the spirit of the
age, and only yielding pious obedience to the personal
commands of her father, Mary shut herself up in her
own mind, or in a world of her own, excluding all
sympathies except such as might come recommended
by community of religious opinions and aspirations ;
and from these resources even she was almost entirely
debarred by the anxious bigotry of the triumphant
creed. All that seemed left to her was the patience
and endurance of a martyr, and the cultivation of the

MAEY. 285
virtues of a religious recluse. Meanwhile a new
generation grew up in the world without, of which
she knew nothing, and which could less and less
sympathise with the antiquated form of her stereo
typed ideas. Even the enthusiasm of the avowed
Catholics of the rising generation was coloured to
some extent by the altered tone of the age, and had
little really in harmony with the ancient religious
type in which Mary's mind had been moulded. StUl
Mary waited and watched, more perhaps in despair
than in hope, and with anticipations of the glories of
the martyr rather than those of the rebuilder of the
faith. Suddenly a door opened to her in the national
reaction against the personal ambition of Dudley and
Grey. The accredited leaders of the Eeformation in
England, in their desperation at the imminent death
of Edward and the accession of a Eoman Catholic
Queen, had overshot the feelings of the nation, and
had identified the interests of Protestantism with
those of a political faction and two or three powerful
families. The will of Henry the Eighth, in which
the nation, with its curious disposition to compromise,
had recognised some atonement for the wrongs of
Catharine of Aragon and her daughter, was set aside
by a political manoeuvre, and the nation was called
upon to assent to Queen Jane Grey as the first article
of the Protestant creed. This — Catholic and Protes
tant alike — it revolted against. A feeling of loyalty to
.the immediate famUy of Henry the Eighth was blended

286 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
with one of compassion for the persecuted daughter
of Catharine, and a really national movement placed
Mary on the throne, and gave her the opportunity of
vindicating her new authority by the manner in
which she employed it. But while the nation saw
in her accession merely the defeat of an ambitious
party, the new Queen saw in it a leading of Provi
dence to a royal work of Eeligious Eestoration, The
role of a constant martyr seemed to be suddenly
changed for that of an apostle. Compared with this
duty, all other considerations became nothing in her
eyes. Her mind was naturally intense rather than
wide, and events had narrowed its scope still more.
She understood nothing of the nation she was about
to lead again into the true fold, but she had un
bounded faith in the wUl of Providence, and no Httle
confidence in herself. By her Tudor decision and
courage she had ensured the success of the move
ment that placed her on the throne; by the same
courage and decision she maintained herself in the
dangerous crisis of the Wyat insurrection, when her
own adherents were on the point of abandoning her.
Every act of persevering boldness in her course
seemed crowned with success, and against these signs
of the wUl and purpose of God, all counsels of
prudence from Catholic subjects and princely aUies
availed nothing. The self-will of her father was
heightened by the zeal of an apostle and the enthu
siasm of a prophet. As her obstinacy raised fresh

MAEY. 287
dangers around her, and aUenated more and more
the sympathies of her people, so her undaunted per
severance seemed to render her almost independent of
national sympathies and of popular support. The
English people had welcomed her accession in no
spirit of national penitence for past religious heresy,
though it had begun to entertain some distrust and
alarm at Dudley's ultra-Protestant policy. But Mary
ordered it to humble itself in abject contrition at the
feet' of an offended but forgiving Sovereign Pontiff,
and the Nation obeyed. The old aUiances of England
with the Spanish Kingdoms and with Burgundy,
which once had a considerable hold on the feelings
of the English middle-class, from considerations of
commercial advantage, had been discredited in their
opinion by becoming in the persons of Charles and
PhUip identified -with the interests of an aggressive
Papal ascendancy. Yet when the long unloved and
unloving Mary, -under the influence of a natural pre-
dUection for her mother's native land, as much, per
haps, as of strong CathoUc sympathies, flxed her
mind on a Spanish marriage, the nation, though it
displayed many signs of dislike and consequent dis
affection, did not rouse itself to secure the success of
an insurrection against the Queen, and the marriage
took place, and PhUip became joint-sovereign of
England, But this very success proved fatal to Mary's
own peace of mind, whUe in its ultimate consequences
it entaUed a terrible addition to the unpopularity of

288 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
her reign. The Queen's passions, though constrained
by circumstances and concealed under a cover of
formal decorum, were intensely strong, and her love
for Philip became as blindly fanatical as her zeal for
the Catholic faith. Her unplastic nature was shattered
by a passion to which it could not quietly assimilate
itself, and there ensued the unseemly spectacle of a
careworn middle-aged woman exhibiting the love^
sick fancies and jealousies of a young girl. Philip,
who had shrunk with aversion from the marriage,
afterwards endured it with the proper courtesy of a
Castilian gentleman; but he only endured it, and
however the Queen might endeavour to deceive her
self, she soon was only too conscious of the fact.
Then came national disaster and dishonour in the
train of this unhappy alliance. Her last hold on the
soil of France was lost to England for ever, and the
Queen, like a true Tudor, felt the disgrace even more
than the nation did, for it seemed to her a condem
nation also of her own cherished and self-willed policy.
Her health as well as her spirits gave way, more and
more, and still the hateful spectre of heresy haunted
the land, and a still more appaUing prospect for the
future presented itself in the succession of her sister
Elizabeth. The vain hope of being succeeded by a
child of her own faded away, and the daughter of
Anne Boleyn as constantly weighed on the mind of
Mary, as she was constantly present to the heart and
the hopes of the English people. As all around her

MARY, 289
darkened, the mind of the Queen became more and
more fanatic, and instead of faltering in her purpose,
she only sought to precipitate its accomplishment.
She would have removed Elizabeth herself from her
path by violent means, but the policy of Philip as a
Spanish King interposed to prevent the destruction
of the great obstacle to the accession to the throne
of England of the betrothed wife of the heir to the
Crown of France, So all that was left to Mary of
England was to continue with increased and unre
mitting severity her war of extermination on the other
leaders of English Protestantism, and on its most
devoted adherents, ' After every aUowance,' says
the Catholic historian Lingard, ' it wUl be found that
in the space of four years almost two hundred per
sons perished in the flames for religious opinions ; a
number at the contemplation of which the mind is
struck with horror.' The natural compassion of Mary,
which had stayed her hand for some time from pro
ceeding to extremities against Jane Grey and the
chiefs of the Dudley-Grey faction, and which displayed
itself in other cases, where the interests of religion
were not supposed to be concerned, was entirely dead
ened in her relation with these hateful heretics.
Faith and a Church had achieved one more victory
over Charity and human nature. For these persecu
tions to the death Mary seems to be herself respon
sible, for the instigators and approvers of her detes
table course were comparatively obscure men. Neither
tr

290 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Gardiner nor Pole, though they had both lent them
selves to the persecution, is personaUy responsible for
the extent to which it was actually carried. The
Catholic world viewed the proceeding with aversion,
and the Pope himself became a counseUor of mode
ration. But Mary's zeal for religion overleapt the
bounds of ecclesiastical, as well as of civil policy, and
ardent defender of the Catholic Church as she was,
she stiU was Tudor enough to assert her authority
against papal dictation. The prohibition of the
publication of a Papal Bull within England by this
champion of Catholicism is the strongest and
strangest proof that the pride of a sovereign and the
strong-wUl of a family cannot be suppressed by the
most imperative claims of a formal creed.
It is difficult to think of Mary in herself and apart
from the fanaticism which absorbed her mind and
her heart. Yet it seems evident that she had not
the power of subordinating her own impulses to
wider considerations of public policy. Not only did
^he reduce a national government to the character
of ¦ a branch of the Inquisition, but she allowed
England to sink into a secondary power in Europe,
in obedience to her personal inclination for Philip
and for Spain. No feeling that this humiliation was
unintentional on the part of the Queen could save
her from a growing unpopularity among the English
people. Nor did her domestic politics redeem her
reputation. She had succeeded, indeed, to an im-

MARY. 291
poverished kingdom, but she entirely failed ui re
cruiting its wasted resources, while lavish in her
benefactions and restitutions to her own Church at
the national expense. Even her highest acts of
statesmanship were unappreciated. Her attempts to
foster the interests of commerce were chiefly pro
spectively advantageous, being dependent on the open
ing of fresh channels of enterprise, and the merchants
felt during her reign only the exactions to which
they were subjected. Poverty of the Exchequer and
heavy taxes without glory were not a programme
likely to concUiate Englishmen, who preferred a
Sovereign that could make the kingdom wealthy and
great, to one who tried to do right and was very
compassionate to the poor. Even the higher morality
and decorum of her Court were robbed of their popu
larity by being associated with stiffness and gloom.
Although, except on the great point of religious per
secution, her errors were venial compared with those
of many of her predecessors, and although she had
instincts of right which few of them displayed,
Mary seemed to be haunted by continual Ul-luck.
The secret perhaps lay in this, that, with good inten
tions and fair abUities, she failed absolutely in one
essential of a great Sovereign, She understood no
thing of the people over whom she ruled, or of the
times in which she was called upon to be a ruler.

V 2

292

ELIZABETH.
The reputation of Elizabeth Tudor has experienced
nearly as many vicissitudes as that of her father,
Henry, but the depreciatory estimate appears to be
lather in the ascendant at the present time, and
there is a disposition to deny to her not merely the
moral, but the intellectual superiority which was
once looked upon as her especial characteristic. No
doubt there has been a great deal of undiscriminating
and uninformed panegyric of the Protestant Queen,
which has provoked, naturally enough, a strong
reaction, as facts have been disinterred, and earlier
judgments have been brought to light, which are
quite inconsistent with this unqualified praise ; but I
am disposed to think that this revulsion of opinion
is likely to lead to an equally erroneous estimate of
her character. If the more favourable view was
wanting in distinctness of delineation, that which is
becoming popular seems to be wanting in breadth
and comprehensiveness; if the former was a mere
generalisation of perfections, the latter appears to me
to be wanting in a sense of the real significance and

ELIZABETH. 293
mutual bearing of her specific acts and of the vary
ing phases of her poUcy,
In her natural character Elizabeth was a true
Tudor, but in the manner and degree of the manifest
ation of the family qualities she differed from both
her father and grandfather in so curiously compli
cated a manner, that it is difficult to say whether we
are more assisted or perplexed in the elucidation of
her real nature by the alternations of these resem
blances and contrasts. There was a coarseness of
grain in the mental organisation of aU the Tudors,
but their physical constitution, as I have already
said, exercised a considerable influence on the man
ner of its development. In Henry the Eighth the
strong physique so predominated that it seems to
overlay and obscure the natural vigour and subtlety
of his mind on ordinary occasions, and it is only on
such questions as the divorce from Catharine of
Aragon that we recognise the inherent famUy ten
dency to casuistry. In Henry the Seventh, on the
contrary, the casuistical element predominated, and
the coarseness of grain showed itself rather in a
passive insensibility to considerations of delicacy and
honour, than in any active self-indulgence. Both
the Henries had an unusuaUy strong wUl, but in
the son it was too often the master of his actions ;
in the father it was tempered and disciplined by
the restraints and considerations of a more sus
tained thoughtfulness. In Elizabeth the headstrong

294 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
self-will of her .father was modified into a femi
nine wilfulness; while the patient and hesitating
thoughtfulness of her grandfather was intensified
into a hampering and tormenting irresolution. In
mental capacity, however, it seems to me that she
excelled both. She had more vigour and elevation
of purpose than her grandfather ; she had more self-
knowledge, and therefore much more self-mastery,
than her father. She had deeper insight and a
wider range of vision than either of them. Henry
the Eighth was the nursling of prosperity. He had
the self-confidence and frankness inspired by a com^
paratively assured position, and both the generosity
and the self-indulgent habits which were the natural
incidents of an overflowing treasury ; he sustained
the position of England, but he wasted her resources,
and absorbed the national in a personal poUcy.
Henry the Seventh and Elizabeth were both trained
in a school of adversity, and both succeeded to a.
starving exchequer, to an unstable throne, and to a
lowered position among the nations of Europe, The
former paid his way and accumulated a vast sum of
money, laid the foundations of a settled state of
society at home, and placed England in a position
of equality abroad. Elizabeth also economised, but
she did not extort or hoard ; for the greater part of
her reign the taxation was light, while the Treasury
was neither bankrupt nor overflowing. Henry the
Seventh never escaped from the influence of his

ELIZABETH, 295
straitened early days, and, except in the fltting mag
nificence of his Court, was to the last very close-fisted.
EUzabeth could scrape for money with as little regard
for decency and dignity as her grandfather, and was
nearly as reluctant as he in disbursing her money.
Both, in fact, had felt the necessity and appreciated the
value and power of money. But iia Henry there was an
unmixed reluctance to part with it under any circum
stances, while in Elizabeth the disinclination seemff
rather to arise from a doubt as to the possible extent of
expenditure to which she was committing herself, and
a terror of indefinite drains on a limited exchequer.
Where she knew the exact extent, and could estimate
the exact significance and efficacy of the payment,
she was often even lavish and seemingly heedless, as
in her gifts to individuals. By this may be explained
what has excited the indignation of later historians,
her largesses to men of the Leicester or Hatton stamp,
as compared with her stint in the crisis of a great
national danger, or in the subsidies necessary to the
efficiency of an enlarged international policy. She
subsidised the former for her own pleasure or pecu
liar ends ; she made them certain benefactions accord
ingly, and so the matter seemed to end. But when
foreign allies or dependents, such as the insurgents-
of Scotland and the Low Countries, repeatedly asked
for money, the quid pro quo was often a little doubt
ful, and the necessity or expediency of the disburse
ment fair matter for hesitation. Even when the

296 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
demand for money seems to us one which was
imperative for the welfare or even safety of England,
we must remember that it presented itself to the
mind of the Queen as one among many similar
conflicting claims on her purse, and that possibly
what now appears to us inexplicable fatuity on her
part may have been the result of a decision (/perhaps
a mistaken one) arrived at after long and anxious
consideration. But unquestionably there was a dangerous ten
dency in the mind of Elizabeth to resist anything
forced upon her as a necessity, and not proceeding
from her own free and spontaneous will. This is a
phase of the wilful side of her character. She could
not endure being dictated to, in appearance even, by
circumstances. She resisted the fatality of events
with the energy of a most persistent advocate of
the doctrine of free-wiU. She appeared almost to
think that the only means of self-assertion lay in
refusing to acknowledge seemingly inevitable con
clusions. She declared herself to be naturally very
irresolute, but her irresolution did not, I imagine,
arise from real self-distrust, so far as this implies the
consciousness of the want of intellectual ability (for
her self-esteem was nearly as great as that of her
father Henry), but from a curious sense of the
inadequacy of any human judgment to cope with the
possibilities of events, and consequently from an

ELIZABETH. 297
exaggerated estimate of the importance of the ele
ment of uncertainty which there must be in every
great problem of action presented to our notice.
Hesitation and delay were in her not the tokens of
an inabUity to grasp the conditions of the question,
but of a mind which saw only too many possible
contingencies, and sought in delay for what a modem
poet has finely expressed as the great deficiency in
times of poUtical storm, ' the leisure to grow wise.'
So far, indeed, was this irresolution from being in
Elizabeth a mark of want of self-confidence, that it
was fostered to a dangerous extent by this very excess
of unconscious self-reliance. Like her great-grand
father, Edward the Fourth, whom she resembled in
not a few respects, she often slighted a danger and
postponed a remedy or a safe-guard until it was
almost too late, from a conviction that, come what
might, she should prove herself equal to the occasion.
As she said to her last Parliament, ' God had given
her a heart that did never fear any enemies,' and
she hesitated and deferred to commit herself unre
servedly to any course of policy, from feeUngs depen
ding partly on a strong sense of possibUities which
might render that course unnecessary or unwise, and
partly- on a conviction that she could at any stage
retrieve, by her own innate capacity, the consequences
of her present hesitation, and so preserve her mastery
of the situation.
But although Elizabeth's inteUect saw difficulties

298 ESTIMATES 0$ THE ENGLISH KINGS.
in every course, her imagination temptations in
every direction, and though her course was often
made Unsteady and uncertain by counter-currents of
pradence, ambition, and wUful caprice, yet, on the
whole, and in the end, taking long periods of time
and a wide range of policy, she pursued the true
course. The very power and subtlety of her mind
indeed led her every now and then into grievous
blunders, and she often allowed her more ignoble
qualities to guide her conduct at the expense of her
own peace of mind. But however she might at times
shrink back from its realisation, she had a vi'vid
conception of a great, wide, and consistent policy,
never entirely lost sight of ^t, and in the end accom
plished it in all material points. She began her rule as
the sovereign of a country one-half of whose inhabit
ants seemed almost boimd by the religious tenets
which they held to look upon her as Ulegitimate, and
as the representative of a great act of national schism,.
which in their hearts they deplored and reprobated.
She found herself in the European Commonwealth a
sort of pariah, tolerated as a matter of policy by rival
nations, but in danger every day of a combination
against her which would prove fatal to her own
Crown, if not to the independence of England. In the
northern portion of her own island a Queen reigned
whose pretensions to the English Crown were avowed,
and supported by much sympathy among English
men themselves, as well by the tie of marriage and

ELIZABETH. 299
the bond of a common religion with the two most
powerful Sovereigns of the Continent. Yet in the
end she not only secured and consolidated her own
throne and baffled every adversary, but even made
both France and Spain unwillingly co-operate to this
very end, and sorely against their own inclinations
remain passive spectators of the downfall of her once
formidable Scottish rival. The general result of the
struggle in which Elizabeth was engaged from her
accession to her death is so evident, that that alone
would be sufficient foundation on which to rest her
claim to sagacity and consistency in essentials. Her
reign was too long, and the circumstances of the
time varied too much during this period, for any run
of mere luck to be a sufficient interpretation of this
success. It was a uniform success, in the end,
against aU opponents under nearly every conceivable
condition under which intellect could be pitted against
intellect. And even if we look at shorter periods of
time, and confine ourselves more closely to specific
questions of policy, the result is in the same direc
tion if not always quite as marked. Historians, who
have been displaying considerable critical acumen in
demonstrating, under the inspiration of the passing
impressions of foreign ambassadors, how thoroughly
Elizabeth mismanaged affairs, are compelled again
and again in their summary of results to acknow
ledge that, somehow or other, notwithstanding all
this bungling, and this wilful disregard of the die-

300 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
tates of wisdom and honour, the catastrophe of the
drama is favourable to the misguided Queen, to a
most strange and unexpected extent. It is only when
we descend to each separate act, and dweU on the
seeming or real vaciUations of every hour in the
mind of the Queen, that we feel any misgivings as to
her intellectual capacity. And it was part of the
peculiar temperament of Elizabeth that, however
subtle and tortuous might be her policy, she seemed
to display every step of it to the critical gaze of
interested spectators. Never was there an intriguer
who worked so openly in the sight of all men ;
never was there a dissembler who threw so little
appearance of reality over the dissimulation. She
cared little, indeed, for giving a passing impression
of weakness and irresolution, and she blinded her
adversaries quite as much by this candid display of
her difficulties as by any more overt act of deception.
She even worked out her own fancies of possibilities
in the possibUity of which she never herself really
believed, before the bewildered eyes of the Spaniard
and the Frenchman, until at last they knew not what
was real and what was delusive, and effectually
secured the purposes of Elizabeth by keeping their
own Courts in an equal state of uncertain perplexity.
She thus played even with her own weaknesses, and
made her own irresolution perform the part of a piece
of clever diplomacy. Much of her dissimulation may
be explained in this manner. She was, as I have

ELIZABETH. 301
said, a bad actor, for she nearly always overdid her
assumed part ; but this arose, to a great extent, from
her dissimulation itself generally representing some
real, though not predominant feature of her o-wn
nature. She was in herself so curious a combination
of contrary and seemingly quite inconsistent feelings
and opinions, that she had only to give for the time
the full rein to any one of these, and without being
false to part of herself, though she was really false to
herself as a whole, she could speak with the earnest
ness of truth, and left her audience in profound doubt
between the impossibUity of the fact in the form in
which it was presented to them, and the impression
of vrais&mblance in the substance of the statement
which her earnestness was, nevertheless, calculated
to produce. She was from the first placed in so
anomalous a position by her birth and her natural
associations, that self-contradiction seemed a neces
sity of her existence. The most autocratic of natures
was tied do-wn by circumstances to become the leader
of the great revolt of free thought against authority
throughout Europe ; a mind most jealous of the
rights and most peculiarly alive to the immunities of
Sovereigns was compelled to become the instigator,
or, at any rate, the countenancer, of rebeUion in half
the States of Europe, and to give a terrible illus
tration in her own kingdom of the responsibility of
kings to the tribunal of public opinion, if not of
justice; one whose tastes and sympathies, as dis-

302 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
tinguished from her intellectual convictions, were
certainly with the great communion of Eome, was
compeUed to become its most deadly enemy, and to
countenance, if not a system, at any rate the favourers
of a system against which her own nature revolted,
as a standard of rebellion, and, in its hard Calvinistic
type, as an intellectual dictator. Is it surprising,
then, that she often hesitated in her path, and often
looked back with longing and doubting eyes to the
fiesh-pots of Egypt, and indulged sometimes in
dreams — but only dreams — of an elysium of repose
in which Eome should be her guardian angel and
PhUip of Spain her natural ally ? But, in the end,
and looking at her course as a whole, she restrained
her own political and religious inclinations as effec
tually as she did her private feelings, when the vision
of the clever, courtly, but reckless Leicester, the play
mate of her youth, and the assiduous flatterer of her
weaker nature, presented itself to her imagination as
her future husband.
But there was an advantage for Elizabeth even in
the self-contradiction of her nature and her position.
If she was divided -within herself, she represented all
the more faithfuUy the divided state of opinion and
feeling within the nation which she governed. She
might and did persecute Puritans, but they felt that
much of her ijUteUect and the very existence of her
queenly position were bound up with her allegiance
to the cause of the Eeformation. She might and did

ELIZABETH. 303
persecute the Eoman Catholics as much as her sister
Mary had persecuted the Protestants, though her
motive was scarcely so much of a religious , as of
a poUtical character. Yet the Catholics felt in their
hearts that Elizabeth liked Protestants little as such,
and stUl less Protestantism as an ecclesiastical
system, and that her heart, though not her head,
was with the old faith. So that neither Puritans
nor Catholics felt themselves entirely cut off from
sympathy with their Sovereign, and alike felt that
she was not merely the Queen of one section or
one faction of her subjects. And this independent
position Elizabeth maintained to the last. She had
strong sympathies with the elder Cecil on many
points ; their natures were in some respects similar,
but their different positions necessarUy made a dif
ference in their mode of looking at public affairs ; and
EUzabeth, though she listened to and trusted William
CecU as she never listened to or trusted any other
man, always preserved her own policy as distinct from
his, and however she might aUow it to be modified,
never permitted it to be superseded by, him. It
was her great merit to find out, and to maintain at
her side, great and capable men, and not to be
unworthUy jealous of any inteUectual comparison
between herself and them. But she never aUowed
them to become the arbiters of the national policy ;
this ultimate arbitration she kept in her own hands,
and she maintained certain checks to their growing

304 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
influence, and often mortified their self-esteem by
lavishing, at the same time, even exaggerated marks
of favour on a set of rivals whoUy inferior to them
in abUity and character, but at the same time the
representatives of feelings and prejudices which had
no little hold on a part of the nation; and which
were kept in order and satisfied by this specious
representation in Court circles. And although
Burghley was in the main a sagacious and right-
minded statesman, it was well for England that
Elizabeth never dropped the reins of power into his
hands ; for, with all his merits, he was stiU the head
of a party and the representative of fixed ideas ; and
party spirit was then the great internal danger of
England, and a too stereotyped policy almost as
great an external disability. It was not CecU, but
EUzabeth, who, by her subtle and delusive policy,
held PhUip in her leading-strings, until the time had
come when he was compelled to make his great
effort against her, under circumstances which, if
still very encouraging, were infinitely less so than
they had been at any epoch since her accession to
the English throne.
Of the better known qualities of Elizabeth I have
little need to speak in detMl. Her personal vanity,
— so open as to be more like a curious affectation
than a real weakness — with its amusing and charac
teristic preference of praise for the youth and beauty
which she had not, to a just meed of admiration for

ELIZABETH. 305
the dignity and grace which she reaUy possessed.
Her royal bearing, which was so greatly aided by a
stately person, a keen, piercing eye, and an aquiline
nose in fuU harmony with her imperial cast of features.
Her urbanity to aU classes, the spell which she threw
over such spirits as Ealeigh and Sydney, and the
somewhat rough and boisterous greetings with which
she encountered the coarser mother-wit and pro
pitiated the good-wiU of the lower orders. Her
woman's nature so complete and so conspicuous in
itself, and yet married to a mind so mascuUne and
so sardonic ! The Parliamentary records tell how
she could manage a House of Commons nearly as
easUy as an individual Minister, recognising its
place in the Constitution, but ruling its insurrectional
energies with a skUful alternation of the curb and the
loose rein. But, as in her foreign and general policy,
the result is the best proof of the judgment and tact
of the means employed. What Sovereign, except
one of great inteUectual ascendancy, could have
evoked at the close of so long a reign, from repre
sentative men who felt and thought so differently
from her on so many delicate points, that outburst of
enthusiastic loyalty and grateful confidence which
crowned the last session of her last Parliament ?
Elizabeth presents a character against which
much may be said with justice in particulars, and
regarding which, as a whole, the verdict in respect
of strict morality can scarcely be a favourable one.
X

806 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
But the maia liaes of the picture are firm and not
unpleasing, and if virtue is to be measured by
greatness of intention — if immorality of practice
can be paUiated in our judgment by the necessities
of an almost unparaUeled position of perplexity and
danger — and if the disposition to good or to evil
is measured by the opportunities offered and the
temptations deliberately overcome, perhaps it wUl
be considered that few Sovereigns have passed
through such an ordeal, under such original disad
vantages of education and peculiar disposition, with
so little dishonour to themselves, and so much ad
vantage to the country whose interests they were
called upon to consult. But it is only through her
inteUectual greatness that we can understand and
appreciate Elizabeth's morality such as it was ; and
it is only on an inteUectual basis, using the term in
its widest sense, that her reputation as one of the
very greatest of English Sovereigns must, after all,
be built up and established.

307

JAMES THE FIBST.
EvEET one who attempts to draw a picture of James
Stuart must feel a great difficulty in the fact that a
master-hand has anticipated him, and that after the
remarkable portrait in Sir Walter Scott's ' Fortunes
of Nigel,' any sketch hy other hands must appear
faint and colourless. All that I can do is to place
before the reader the salient features of a character
of which the popular mind has already a tolerably
correct impression.
As to the more prominent and superficial charac
teristics of James, there can be little fear of going
astray, either in the direction of caricature Pr flattery.
These are to be gathered from the pages of nearly
every writer of the period, and they are presented
in unmistakable features under the hand of the
King himself, in his printed works and in his
famUiar correspondence. All that there can be any
hesitation or dispute about is whether certain am
biguous and questionable transactions have or have
not a deeper moral significance, and do or do not
imply a greater capabUity for evil. On these points,
X 2

308 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
however, the evidence we possess is so inadequate
and so perplexing, that anyone in forming a decision
must rely to a considerable extent on his favourable
or unfavourable prepossessions, and it is more pru
dent to confine oneself to a statement of the difficulty,
and to suspend a decided judgment,
James the Sixth of Scotland ascended the throne
of England in the thirty-seventh year of his age.
His character therefore, whatever it was, might in
any case be supposed to have been fully matured,
and events had in his case precipitated this develop
ment. Anything more unfavourable than the train
ing of early circumstances which he underwent can
hardly be imagined. The accredited chUd of a mar
riage terminated by a tragedy which has cast a deep
stain of suspicion on the memory of one parent ; with
the taint of possible illegitimacy attaching itself to
his own birth; at first the involuntary supplanter
and then the successful rival of his own mother, he
was from his earliest years placed in a position from
which few characters, indeed, could have escaped
-without serious detriment, and from which his own
pecuUar character was especiaUy likely to suffer.
His sympathies, deprived by the necessities of his
position of even the power of expansion afforded by
the relations of the famUy circle, were from the first
turned inwards on himself, and the domestic ties
which he afterwards formed, as husband and father,
implying deference to his superior wisdom and wiU,

JAMES THE FIEST. 309
were only such as to exaggerate this egotism of
thought and feeling. When he reached years of in
teUigence, he found himself in the hands of ambitious
statesmen and fierce factions, by whom his person
was used as an instrument of authority for purposes
as to which his own wishes were scarcely ever con
sulted. WhUe thus he was made to feel the signifi
cance and importance of the royal name and authority
more and more, and in the downfall of each of his
successive masters saw a lesson of the instabiUty of
usurped and illegitimate power, he was naturaUy led
to place a disproportionate value on the exercise of
his own free-wiU, and to regard any suspension of
this as equivalent to a condition of public instabUity
and anarchy. As time rolled on, opportunities of
-temporary self-assertion presented themselves more
frequently in the rivalries of contending parties, and
almost insensibly his personal wishes gained more
influence over the course of events. In proportion
as the restraints frequently imposed on his authority
and will had been unduly severe, so the licence which
was every now and then afforded to his prejudices
and caprices was dangerously great. Whenever he
was at all a free agent, he was so absolutely and with
out restriction. How he availed himself of these
opportunities the records of Scotland during thai
period tell us too plainly. Afraid of trusting himself
to any man of established position or commanding
talents, lest he should find in him only another

810 ESTIMATES OF THE' ENGLISH KINGS-
master, James "threw himself into ; tlie hands of fa
vourites, who owed all their fortunes to his bounty,
and whom on that account he could complacently
regard as the creatures of his will, and the mere
ministers of his wishes. These men were not worse
in character than most of the actors in the events pf
those days, but they possessed the disqualificaition of
being by the very nature of their position destitute
of sympathies with the nation, and mere exponents
and agents of a strictly personal policy. By them
the iping's natural weakness of character was fostered
and aggravated, and the petty tyranny which his
foolish fondness enabled each in turn to exercise over
him was exercised to the advantage not of the nation
at large, but of the favourite himself and his personal
connections. MeanwhUe the great religious move
ment which had for the first time created a reaUy
national life in Scotland suffered in tone and mode
of expression from the low and selfish influences with
which it was thus brought into contact, and the
mantle of John Knox descended on men who imitated
his uncompromising and uncourtly bluntness of man
ner, without maintaining his high purposes and his
lofty principle. They could beard and insult the
King in his palace and denounce him from the pulpit,
but they shared eventually the fate of those who in
trude into a sphere of action which lies apart
from the centres of their natural strength, and par
took of the vicissitudes of Court intrigue, instead of

JAMES THE FIRST, 311
controUing the currents of popular sentiment. They
alienated the mind of the King thoroughly from all
sympathy with their religious cause, by associating
it -with constant antagonism to all that he cherished
and desired, and with indolence to his own person.
Thus to the other delights of the Promised Land,
which his succession to the throne of England
offered to James, were added the hope of being able
there to gratify his secret but ingrained loathing of
Presbyterian ism and Presbyterians, and the joy of
making the Bishops who governed the Church as he
made the ministers who governed the State, Every
restraint, indeed, that he suffered from in Scotland
increased his desire to attain to the southern elysium,
and exaggerated to his imagination the extent of the
emancipation from controlwhich he would there secure.
The real conditions under which the Tudors had exer
cised such almost unlimited power, his mind — even
had its early discipline been less unfortunate — would
never have been capable of grasping, far less of being
guided by in his nUes of action. He never could
have been brought to see that the reason why that
astute line of Sovereigns were subjected to so little
control from the people whom they governed, was
because they had the art and wisdom of so much
controUing themselves where national feelings were
concerned, and of making themselves the expo
nents of the national will, instead of setting up any
personal policy of their own as its ostentatious anta-

312 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
gonist. To the mind of James there was no medium
between being browbeaten by insolent nobles and
presuming preachers, and being able to indulge to
the utmost, without regard to any external circum
stances, his own unbridled fancies. Order with him
was another name for licence in the Euler, just as
Anarchy was for licence in the Subject, Had he been
capable of interpreting rightly anything that he saw,
the minute knowledge of the real state of affairs in
England during the latter years of Elizabeth, which
his frequent communications with the leading states
men and aspiring politicians of that kingdom offered
to him, ought to have instructed him on this point.
But his mind was quite unequal to looking at more
than one point at a time, and he almost invariably
confined himself to those which were most insigni
ficant and irrelevant. Of the power of combining
ideas and forming a just deduction from them he was
quite destitute. Little side-channels constantly at
tracted his notice and excited his curiosity so forcibly,
that he exhausted all his shrewdness a.nd the re
sources of a misceUaneous and iU-digested stock of
learning in exploring their byeways and in fathoming
the supposed depths of their shallows, while the main
stream which led straight to the desired bourne
passed by him, though stretched before his eyes, un
heeded and unknown. In little things he could be
very shrewd, both in word and deed. But his
shrewdness instinctively failed him exactly where its

JAMES THE FIRST. 313
exei'cise was of most importance. Like most persons
who are great in small things, he had an overweening
opinion of his own wisdom and sagacity. He seri
ously beUeved that he could easily deal with questions
which had baffled or perplexed Elizabeth, and com
mand where she had been content to temporise and
persuade. He could so little estimate a really great
crisis that, instead of feeling any difficulty or doubt
as to its solution, he unconsciously lowered its pro
portions to the standard of his own mind, and felt
himself fully master of the situation. His real quali
fications, such as they were, served to increase this
delusion. He had been crammed with the ponderous
learning of the day, and he had the insatiate craving
for more food of this description which is felt by
those who read without digesting, and acquire a vast
stock of knowledge without adding, except in an in
finitesimal degree, to the treasures and capacity of
their own mind. The wisdom which was scattered
through the pages which he perused passed into his
mind in the concrete shape of aphorisms and astute
generalities, which were ever in his mouth, and
might give a superficial impression of a superior un
derstanding. A dry and somewhat sarcastic sense
of humour even suggested a still greater penetration.
But he had never reaUy mastered the meaning of
what he read so as to be able to apply it ; it formed
no part of his practical rule of conduct, and was as
useless for any practical purpose as if he had been a

314 ESTIMATES OF THE ENG-LISH KINGS.
dunce instead of a pedant. His occasional humor
ous sayings were, after all, the expression of mere
superficial and transient perceptions, and impUed no
actual insight into the relations of things. The real
motive and explanation of his actions generaUy lay
somewhere else — in some rooted prejudice, in some
vain self-conceit, in some passing passion, or in a
careless good-nature. His faith in his own capacity
for government, and his ambition to emulate the
great kings whose reputation he admired, and whose
axioms were his common-places, joined to an easy,
good-natured, and kindly temperament, made him
disposed to govern well, and to promote the happiness
and prosperity of his people. But this general pur
pose was proof against no temptation of personal
selfishness or idle caprice, and of little practical value
in a prince who had no power of looking beyond
immediate circumstances, and no capacity of sym
pathy with anything which did not lie within his
own narrow circle of ideas, or which did not, to his
Umited understanding, palpably concern his own in
terests. He had learned so long to consider these
interests as the centre of everything that was impor
tant, that he could not conceive of anything which
lay, or seemed to lie, beyond their sphere being
worthy of consideration. Neither national sentiment
nor the welfare of an individual subject entered into
the constituent elements of his decisions, except in
the form of a fear to be guarded against, or an adver-

JAMES THE FIRST. 31.5
sary to be disarmed. Both his mind and heart were
shallow. His anger was violent and unseemly in its
manifestation, but quickly evanescent; and his re
sentments, though they were not easily entirely
eradicated, were rather recurring than chronic in
their symptoms, and were easily superseded, at least
for the time, by passing impressions and incidental
feelings. As a rule, he rather cherished a grievance
than resented injuries. A few things and a few per
sons, indeed, he hated with an intenser feeling,
almost unaccountable in its disproportionate strength.
He detested the use of tobacco, and he hated its
great patron, Ealeigh — ^the first theoretically, the
second instinctively, from a consciousness of the
natural antagonism of such a nature (both in its good
and evil points) to his own ; but while no amount of
reason would have convinced him of error in the
former case, his own interests (when he could be
made to see them) would be sufficient to disarm for
the time his active resentment in the latter case.
If it were not for e-vidence that James was as
unconscious of his physical as he was of his mental
deficiencies, one might have been inclined to suppose
that he placed an undue value on the little wit he
did possess, from a feeling that he could lay claim to
no respect on the score of his personal appearance or
bodily accomplishments. The son of a very hand
some mother, and the accredited son of a handsome
father, he resembled neither of them in physical

'316 ESTIMATES 'OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
appearance. Scandal said that his want of good
looks and ungainliness were additional proofs of the
paternity which it assigned to him. Perhaps the
most minute description of his person in later years
which is free from satirical animus is that given
by the Court physician. Sir Theodore Mayerne, in
his memorials of his professional attendance on the
King. Sir Theodore (as quoted by Sir Henry EUis)
says that his Majesty's legs were slender — scarcely
strong enough to carry his body; that his jaw was
narrow, and rendered swaUowing difficult — a defect
which he inherited both from his mother and from
his grandfather. King James the Fifth; that in
moist weather and winter he had usually a cough ;
that his skin was soft and delicate, but irritable; that
he never ate bread, always fed on roast meat, and
seldom or never ate of boiled, unless it was beef;
that he was very clumsy in his riding and hunting,
and frequently met with accidents ; that he slept Ul,
waked often in the night, and called his chamberlains ;
nor could sleep be again easUy induced, unless some
one read to him; that he was passionate, but that his
wrath quickly subsided; that he had naturally a
good appetite, and a moderately fair digestion ; that
he was very often thirsty, drank frequently, and
mixed his liquors, being very promiscuous in the use
of wines. Sir Theodore, however, adds that his head
was strong, and never affected by the sea, by drinking
wine, or riding in a chariot. Till 1613 he had never

JAMES THE FIEST. 317
taken medicine, and, like his predecessor, was always
averse to it. Towards the close of his life the Kino-
suffered under a complication of disorders, stone,
gout, and gravel. Sir Theodore dwells particularly
on the grief of James for the deaths of Prince
Henry and the Queen ; the latter was followed by a
severe illness at Eoyston, Another friendly writer,
FuUer, says that (after his accession to the English
throne) ' his Scotch tone he rather affected than de
clined, and though his speaking spoiled his speech
in some English ears, yet the masculine worth of his
set orations commanded reverence, if not admiration,
in all judicious hearers; but in common speaking,
as in his hunting, he stood not upon the clearest,
but the nearest way. He would never go about to
make any expressions.' Unfriendly writers give little
more than a malicious amplification of the above
particulars. We learn from them that the King was
of middle stature, moderately corpulent; his eyes
large and always roUing, and his beard thin — his
tongue so much too large for his mouth that he
drank in an unseemly manner. His legs were weak,
and his walk circular. This weakness caused him to
lean on other men's shoulders, and was the source of
the unseemly loUing on his favourites which was so
much remarked. He was constant in his apparel,
usually dressing in the same fashion, and delighting
to wear his clothes tUl they came to rags. His
doublet was quilted for stiletto-proof. His dress is

318 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
idescribed as of bright green. He never washed his
hands, but only rubbed his fingers slightly with the
wetted end of a napkin. That he was a great
drinker of wine we have seen already on indisputable
evidence ; whether he was often overcome by it is a
matter of doubt. The physician's account proves that
he was not intoxicated easUy, but we know from dis
tinct evidence that he was certainly so occasionaUy.
Other accounts teU us that he took very little at a
time, but that the wine was very strong, and that he
took it very frequently; so that probably, without
being often visibly overcome by it, he was always to
some extent under its influence ; and in his later
years, when he often suffered from acute pain, he
drank more copiously at a time; and the effects were
more evident.
But if nature had given James an unprepossessing
personal appearance and an ungraceful carriage, he
increased the effects of both by his careless and un
becoming habits. If his person had little in it to
inspire reverence, by his demeanour he often pro
duced a more active feeling of disgust and con
tempt. The reports of the French ambassadors at
the English Court are to be received, no doubt, with
caution, since James was regarded by them as an
enemy, in consequence of his Spanish leanings but
they record certain phases of character which are so
much in harmony with the impression left by nearly
all contemporaty accounts, and by James's own corre-

JAMES THE FIRST, 319
spondenee, -that they can hardly be very far from the
actual truth. 'When he wishes to assume the
language of a king,' they observe, ' his tone is that
of a tyrant ; and when he condescends, he is vulgar.'
And again, they teU us that the King ' was yesterday
a Uttle disturbed by the populace, which ran to
gether from all sides to see him. He feU into such
anger upon this, that I was quite unable to appease
him ; he cursed every one he met, and swore that if
they would not let him follow the chase at his
pleasure he would leave England — words of passion
which meant no harm, but calculated to draw uponhim
great contempt and inextinguishable hate from the
people.' By thus neglecting so simple a means of
obtaining popularity as a little courtesy and affability
on a chance occasion such as this, James threw away
wantonly one of the great props of the power of his
predecessor, and reduced himself for the support of
his administration to the bare theory of monarchy,
stretched in an ostentatious manner to its utmost ex
tent. No theory, however good, could stand so per
petual an appeal to its unsupported authority. In
stead of accepting the constitution of England as he
found it established, and making it, as Elizabeth had
done, the instrument of his own purposes by always
displaying sympathy with the predominant and most
cherished feeUngs of the nation, James fretted under
its restraints, and was always trydng in some manner
more or less direct to remove its safeguards and

320 ESTIMATES. OP THE- ENGLISH KINGS.
undermine its foundations. ' The King of Spain,' he
observed bitterly to Gondomar, the Spanish am
bassador, has more kingdoms and subjects than I
have, but there is one thing in which I surpass him.
He has not so large a Parliament. The Cortes' of
CastUe are composed of little more than thirty per
sons. In my kingdom there are nearly five hundred.
The House of Commons is a body without a head
The members give their opinions in a disorderly man
ner. At their meetings nothing is heard but cries,
shouts, and confusion. I am surprised that my an
cestors should ever have permitted such an institution
to come into existence. I am a stranger, and I
found it here when I came, so I am obliged to put up
with what I cannot get rid of.' Such being the
spirit in which James regarded his Parliament, it
can hardly be wondered at that the disagreements
between them were frequent and serious. But so far
from merely putting up with what he found, James,
after attempting to encroach on the privUeges of that
assembly, found it necessary not only to recede, but
to make greater concessions than Elizabeth had ever
made, without gaining any of the credit for the act
which she obtained. For he always yielded too late,
and when all the grace of concession was over.
There was one feature in the character of James
which was the source of much of his conduct. He
was by nature more than timid, he was an abject
coward, and nothing but some imminent fear in

JAMES THE FIRST. 321
another direction could rouse him to anything manly
either in thought or action. The terrors of the night
in which David Eizzio was murdered are supposed to
have had something to do with this temperament, and
James seems to be entitled quite as much to our com
passion as to our contempt for this characteristic. It
also was not without a certain beneficial effect in one
respect on the mind of the English Nation, though
it had a tendency to demoralise it in other ways.
The enterprises of Elizabeth's sailors against the
Spaniards in the West Indies, while they had mate-
riaUy assisted in raising the national reputation, and
breaking down the power of Spain, had engendered
a buccaneering and freebooting spirit in EngUshmen
of aU classes, which, if left unchecked, might have
materiaUy lowered ere long the whole national cha
racter. The cowardice of James put a check to this,
though at the expense of the national reputation and
the national honour, and when the opportunity of
action was again offered, to the saUors of England,
they made their expeditions under the influence of
other and higher feeUngs, and the gallant semi-pirates
Drake and Ealeigh were succeeded by the equally
gallant but high-souled and religious Blake. James,
from the very fear of fighting, was a peacemaker by
nature, and whatever religious principle he had, de
veloped itself in nearly the only Christian maxim
which he attempted to realise practically, 'Blessed
are the peacemakers ! ' Yet, in his hands, this
T

322 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
maxim became a cover for all sorts of base and im-
becUe proceedings. Of course, he was not capable
of grasping the real meaning of the sentiment, and
consequently, while he every now and then violated
both its letter and spirit by useless and faint-hearted
demonstrations of physical force, he preserved the
letter and violated the spirit in a wanton abandonment
of his duties as a King of England and a Prince of
Europe. There may be differences of opinion at the
present day as to the wisdom or impolicy of an
armed intervention by England at that epoch in the
affairs of the Continent — ^though the mere instinct
of self-preservation appeared to demand it ; but there
can be none as to the shifty, vaciUating course which
James actually pursued. The victories of Gustavus
Adolphus and the Eevolution in England which
placed CromweU at the head of affairs, saved us from
much of the danger to which, humanly speaking,
England had exposed herself from the great Catholic
league, by the inaction and ill-directed action of
James, and so have to a great degree cloaked his
misconduct; but even the most uncompromising
advocates of a strictly pacific non-intervention and
of patriotism in its narrowest sense, wiU shrink from
committing themselves to praise of the policy of the
Stuart King, which, pacific in name, was in fact a
series of unnecessary humiliations.
But, in truth, the motives of the action and inac
tion of James in this matter, though instigated and

JAMES THE FIRST. 323
fostered by a love of peace, were not merely pacific.
The country with which it was the wish of English
men, and to them, at any rate, seemed to be their
duty, to go to war, was the representative of a prin
ciple of absolute power in kings, which had a charm
for the imagination of James that largely increased
his disinclination to become the enemy of its assertor.
His elysium of autocracy was now transferred from
London to Madrid, and the representatives of the
system of popular anarchy were now, to his mind, the
United Provinces of HoUand and the Palatine-Kinsr of
Bohemia, whose cause he was asked to espouse. The
only disturbing forces to this bias in favour of Spain
and this antagonism to Continental Protestantism
were the terrors of gunpowder plots at home, a royal
jealousy of Papal supremacy, and a hankering after
the fiattering position of the acknowledged head of
the Protestant interest in Europe, And it is by the
alternate ascendancy of these conflicting sentiments,
joined to an occasional dread of the indignation of
his own people, that the vacUlatiag and tortuous
course of James's foreign policy is mainly to be ex
plained. Any other acts of his in this department
which may seem inexplicable are probably to be re
ferred to the fussy restlessness of his nature, which
made him a busybody, though it could not nerve
him to serious or decided action.
The poverty of his exchequer, to which his policy
of abstinence from war has been sometimes speciously
T 2

324 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
attributed, can hardly be its true explanation, James"
always found money to spend on Court festivities and
pleasures, and to lavish on his extravagant favourites ;
and one great reason of his being unable to procure
more money frpm his Parliaments was the fact, that
he wasted on such objects that which had been already
bestowed on him, instead of employing it for the
furtherance of a great national policy. In the cause
of the Palatine, at any rate, if not in that of their
commercial rivals, the Dutch Provinces, the purse-
strings of the English people would have been wUl-
ingly undrawn. I come then to, what must be my
last point, the relations between James and his
Favourites, and the questionable deaths of Prince
Henry and Sir Thomas Overbury. In the case of
any one less foolish than James, I must confess that
I should be inclined, from the evidence we possess,
to draw the most unfavourable inferences as to the
nature of the unseemly famUiarity which existed be
tween this king and Carr and VUliers. But James
had so little idea of dignity and decency of deport
ment, and was so gross and prurient in his imagi
nation, as distinguished from immorality in act, that
I hesitate to decide against him, and even incline to
the belief that he -was innocent of the deeper charge.
As to the death of Prince Henry, if it were not a
natural one, — on which point I do not think our evi
dence enables us -to^ pronounce an absolute opinion,
though it seems rather to preponderate against the

JAMES THE FIEST, 325
poisoning theory — I do not believe that James at the
worst can be accused of anything more than perhaps
a guilty knowledge or suspicion that something
against the life of the Prince had been contemplated,
¦probably in that case by some one who was too dear
to him, or too much in his secrets, for him to over
come a cowardly disinclination to interfere. Even
this is very doubtful, and nothing but the prying
character and strange conduct of James himself
would justify me in saying as much as this, even in
the case of so suspicious a death. Of the Overbury
business I can speak stUl less decidedly, for it is en
veloped in the most perplexing obscurity. It seems
to me almost impossible to read the letters of James
to the Lieutenant of the Tower, when Somerset gave
vent to some threat of what he would do if he were
brought to his trial for the murder, without the gravest
suspicion that James had some guilty knowledge, if
not actual connivance in the affair. No mere poli
tical secret seems to be an adequate explanation of
his evident terror and consternation. It was clearly
something strictly personal in its imputation, the
disclosure of which the King sP fearfully dreaded ;
and there is unfortunately nothing in James's private
character to place an absolute negative on the un
favourable solution I have hinted at, though there
is not anything to make the presumption over^
powering. Such, in the main features of his character, appears

326 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
to me to have been James Stuart, one of the weakest,
though perhaps not the most worthless, of the Kings
who had reigned in England since the days of Henry
the Third, Knowing just too much and thinking
just too much to be a passive spectator of events,
but with far too little either of real knowledge or
thoughtfulness to be fit for the direction of any great
affair, self-conceited rather than self-confident or self-
reliant, a phUosopher and a Christian in theory, and
a fool and an unscrupulous man in practice, he pro
bably did as little good, though perhaps also as
little evU, as any man with such stagnant good in
tentions and such active inclinations.

327

CHABLES THE FIBST.
The character of Charles Stuart is stUl the subject of
warm controversy, and there is Uttle probabUity of
pubUe opinion becoming unanimous on the question,
for his life is not merely the story of the career of an
individual sovereign, but the record of a great national
struggle, and of the most important era in the civU
history of England, Hence, although comparatively
fewpersons are now to be found who wUl commit them
selves to an unreserved panegyric of Charles, there is
stiU so large an amount of sympathy in certain classes
of society with the political and religious tendencies
which he is supposed to represent, and of dislike to
the persons or principles of those by whom he was
opposed, as to create a disposition to regard aU his
actions from a favourable point of view, and to
extenuate, if not defend, his most questionable
proceedings. Independently, too, of these preposses
sions, there is something in the character of Charles,
and in the real facts of the case, to mislead a su
perficial observer, and at first to lend a certain
plausibUity to the attractive picture of him which
the softening influences of time and the imaginations

328 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS,
of his sympathisers have substituted for the real man.
Every one is acquainted with the conception of him
which is stUl perhaps the prevalent one in the
majority of English drawing-rooms, as a stately
English gentleman of the most refined tastes and
habits, of highly cultivated mind, deep religious
feelings, and the purest morals, who unfortunately
entertained — or rather was educated into — notions of
absolute authority, which were inconsistent with the
predominant spirit of the age, though justified by
precedents, and who, after making every concession
consistent with right to the exorbitant demands of
his rebeUious subjects, resisted them by arms in
strict self-defence, and more than expiated any errors
he had committed in his lifetime by his heroic and
saintly bearing on the scaffold. Yet such a repre
sentation, in my opinion, can be supported only by
the widest deductions from the most imperfect pre
misses, by a total disregard of aU but a few isolated
facts, and a violation of all the sequences and natural
relations of events. Very different wiU be the result
if, abandoning all vague generalities, we study the
man in the realities of his actual life, and aUow these
to speak for themselves, as we should do in estimating
,the character and motives of other men. At the
same time, the truer portrait may explain the origin
of the highly-coloured party tradition.
The best plea in extenuation of any fa,ults in the
character of Charles is, that he was the son of such a

CHARLES THE FIEST. 329
man as we have seen James Stuart to have been, and
that he was brought up under such influences as
would spring from the character of his father, and
the morale of such a Court and such an administration
of affairs. Charles could not have escaped altogether
from the contagion of such an atmosphere, unless he
had himself possessed a temperament which acted as
a natural antidote to the poison, or unless his moral
organisation was of so high an order as to enable
him to perceive and deliberately eschew the evU
infiuences to which he was exposed. From this
point of view, then, while proper allowance must be
made for the evU in the character or conduct of
Charles which can be identified as hereditary, or the
result of early training and early associations, we
must also discriminate, in arriving at a conclusion as
to his moral calibre, between that absence of evil in
him which was the result of an immunity from
temptation and due to his natural temperament, and
that which sprang from his conscious preference of
good to evil, where that natural temperament gave a
dangerous incentive to pursue the wrong path. Nor,
whUe we lay proper stress on the impressions as to
,his rights and duties which he may have derived
from early tuition, must we forget to note any facts
which may show that he had become alive to the
erroneousness of these early lessons soon enough to
have saved him from evil consequences if he had only
-been self-consistent in his subsequent career. Looked

330 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
at in this manner, what do we find to be the leading
facts bearing on the character and moral responsibUity
of Charles?
He was the son of a man of gross temperament,
who, if not from that cause actuaUy very profligate,
was flagrantly indecorous in his habits, and the
diffusive centre of licentiousness in court and
country. But the natural temperament of Charles
was of a finer grain, and although he had no such
active antipathy to debauchery as to prevent him
from adopting an unscrupulous debauchee as his
only bosom friend, and though he had become
habituated to and tolerant of an amount of grossness
and immorality in his daily associations that would
surprise some of his modern admirers, and shocked
the nice susceptibilities of some of the more pure-
minded among his contemporary partisans — he was
himself generaUy cleanly and decorous in his personal
habits, and compared with his father and his father's
courtiers, and many of his ovm, moral in conduct
and refined in tastes. That he was personaUy not
entirely untainted on this point by the associations
of his early life is demonstrable, but whUe this is not
to be dwelt upon as an index of his real character,
only a modified praise can be bestowed on his
superiority to James in decorum of life. His morality
in this respect was too passive to be estimated as a
great virtue, and affords no evidence of higher per
ceptions of moral purity. A formal decorousness of

CHARLES THE FIRST. 331
demeanour was in harmony with his natural coldness
of temperament and reserve, and threw around the
person of Charles a halo of respectabUity which
would not have attached to him had his nature been
more emotional. An overruling sense of duty seems
scarcely more strongly marked in such a morality,
than it is in the general acceptance of the moral rules
of any church or creed. In this restricted sense
Charles may have striven to live morally, and, as far
as this implies merit, he is entitled to it. There was,
however, another feature in his demeanour, which
the popular mind has instinctively perceived, and on
which the idea of his superiority is mainly based.
This is the aesthetic one. By nature Charles was an
artist, as weU as in fact a connoisseur and patron of
art. His Ul-health as a boy, the weakness of his
limbs at that period, and his imperfection of speech
had suggested the cultivation of a naturaUy fine eye,
as an important resource, and a certain external
refinement of manner had been the result, which
would have been sufficient in itself to make a
marked distinction between him and his father
James, The dignity of bearing in Charles, which
owed so much to this Eesthetic cause, and which was
sustained by a profound sense of self-importance and
superiority, was, it is true, too often replaced and
travestied by a frigid haughtiness, and was sometimes
lost altogether in moments of great irritation and
when this self-conceit was strongly outraged ; but at

332 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
other times it might be easUy mistaken for that true
courtesy which arises from a constant sense of what
is due to the position and feeUngs of others as well
as to a man's own. But of this essential charac-
, teristic of a really high-bred gentleman, Charles was
destitute, and although we must attribute his
deficiency in a great measure to the unfortunate
infiuence and example of his father, and cannot
therefore in justice allow it to weigh much in the
scale in our general moral estimate of him, it is a
fact, nevertheless, which must materially affect our
sympathy with his character as a whole.'
There was another refining influence to vrhich the
character of Charles was subjected in early years,
which might have been also an elevating one of no
common kind. The same physical weakness which
had led him to his art-studies had made him — in this
case, no doubt, with the strong encouragement of his
father — a diligent and earnest reader of books. His
deeper studies of dogmatic and scholastic theology
were relieved by the Uterature of the poets and
dramatists ; and had the wise lessons to be derived
from the pages of Shakspeare made as much
impression on the mind of Charles as did, unfortu
nately, the divinity schoolmen and the casuists of the
thenrecently risen advocates of right-divine in Church
' Miss Austen, in her very effective tale, ' Persuasion,' appears to me
to preserve in Sir Walter Elliot some idea of -what King Charles's
gentlemanly stamp really was.

CHARLES THE FIEST. 333
and King, we might have counted his early Ul-health
as a piece of real good-fortune for the country which
he was to govern. Unfortunately, when his increas
ing bodily strength enabled him to aspire to the
physical accomplishments suitable to his age and
position, he had acquired the taste for, and was
submittiag his mind to, the guidance of far less
healthy teachers than the great master-spirit of
English literature, Charles had not been born to
the position of heir to the Crowii ; in his childhood
he had been to some extent slighted, and he did not
become a person of real importance in the State
until the death of his elder brother Henry, when
he himself was twelve years of age. But he had
already learnt some of those lessons of self-importance
and of superiority to ordinary considerations, which
the literary productions of his own father, as weU as
the teaching of the Churchmen to whose tuition
James had confided him, were constant in inculcating;
and these lessons perhaps gained an additional relish
from the memories of his own early insignificance.
His mind had been prepared for the application of
these lessons by that early necessity of living very
much in himself, which had fostered the natural
reserve of his disposition, and made him stiU more
self-centred. Thus disposed, he would learn from
his tutors, and the books to which they directed him,
to look upon government as an absolute function of
the Sovereign, quite as independent of the wUl of

334 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the governed as the mass performed by the priest at
the altar is of the personal participation of the
worshippers in whose presence and for whose benefit
it is performed. And however plainly the facts of
the case were forced on his attention when he
descended into the arena of practical politics, and
however often in his personal acts and under peculiar
circumstances Charles may have seemed to recognise
facts as such, his mind never really recognised them,
but recurred to those studies of early life in which
theory stood for fact, in which facts were ignored,
and in which truth and falsehood had a distinctive
significance not with reference to the duties and
obligations of real life, but to a standard of conscience
to which those duties were entirely subordinated, and
by which they were taken into account only so far
as they did not contravene the conclusions and
objects of one narrow school of thought. This
casuistical way of looking at things was peculiarly
dangerous in the case of a man so reserved by nature
as Charles, OriginaUy perhaps this reserve was
little more than the strong reluctance to express his
views, felt by one who had a difficulty in speaking,
and was conscious of being in a secondary position
in the estimation of his auditors. But as he grew up,
there can be no doubt that the reserve was caused
much less by self-diffidence than by self-conceit;
much less by the fear of falling short of the
inteUectual standard of those with whom he

CHARLES THE PIRST. 335
associated, than by a profound belief that his own
wisdom was so complete already that it could gain
nothing from being brought into contact with the
opinions of other men. From concealing his own
real thoughts, the step was an easy one to deceiving
others by giving utterance to sentiments which were
absolutely untrue as expressions of his real opinions.
The overt act of a lie seemed frequently the best
method of incommunicativeness, and the lying of
Charles differed in this essential point from that of
Elizabeth, that it did not represent any occasional
or partial sentiment of his mind, but was entirely
external to his whole nature, and was justified
probably to his conscience by the casuistical argu
ment that its perpetration was an essential agency
in a policy which, as a whole, represented his
real views, and, indeed, to his eyes the cause of
truth. The barrier of truth once overleapt, there was not
sufficient depth in the moral consciousness of Charles
to enable him ever to recover the distinction between
right and wrong on this point. For though his
mind was much more firmly knit (if I may use the
expression) than that of his father, and though his
purposes and his processes of reasoning were much
more deUberate and sustained, and his whole nature,
so to say, more uniform than was that of James, his
inteUect was neither comprehensive nor deep. He
adopted a course of conduct more advisedly and

336 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
pursued it more steadily, but he was quite as in
capable as James of perceiving its necessary issues,
or of estimating its bearings on other issues and on
the general relations of affairs. He was as little
master of the situation, and quite as much at the
mercy of his own ill-conceived ideas as James,
though so different in his mode of action. If James
was carried about by every passing caprice or dis
turbing circumstance, and realised nothing sufficiently
to care to persevere in any course long together,
Charles became almost as inconstant and tortuous in
his actions, from the mere fact of being unable to
perceive the fundamental and fatal discrepancy
between his general purpose and the strokes of
policy into which the dictates of a self-satisfied but
shallow nature were constantly seducing him. Thus,
when blinded by mortified pride, and carried away
by the artfully insinuated influence of VUUerg, he
was seeking to revenge himself on the Spanish Court,
after his inglorious return from his marriage expe
dition, he did not see the dangerous antagonism
between the policy of popularity-hunting, which he
pursued in the middle of the year 1624, and the
spirit in which he had written in the November of
1621 to his favourite adviser respecting the popular
leaders in Parliament, — 'I could wish that the King
would send down a commission here that (if need
were) such seditious fellows might be made an
example to others,' — and had laid claim, to this

CHAELES THE FIEST. 337
piece of advice distinctively 'as of my adding.'
Nor, again, Avas he able to perceive the equally
dangerous discontinuity between this popular course
which he had so vehemently and recklessly pursued
at the close of his father's reign, and down to the
very day of his own accession, and the autocratic
reserve and one-sided conception of the obligations
between himself and his people which he adopted
immediately after this latter event. And, as we
have seen, there was no true standard of right or
wrong in his mind to rectify this grave error.
The same inabUity to preserve in his mind the
idea of the essentials of his real and ultimate object,
joined to an infatuated belief in his own power of
complicated diplomacy, led to the contradictory
proposals and projects which he entertained simul
taneously during the progress of the great civU
struggle in which he involved himself. The action
of Charles alternated between simple and direct op
position to the national sentiment, and a multiplicity
of cunningly devised expedients to obtain the same
ends through hidden and tortuous channels. Most
of these expedients were plausible and feasible in
themselves, but to play with them all at the same
time, and to manipulate them so as to secure his;
own ends out of their contrariety, required the genius
of a Eichelieu, which Charles in the blindness of his
self-esteem beUeved himself reaUy to possess. Of
tjie moral obliquity of such a course in reference to
z

338 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
his duties to indi-viduals and to the nation Charles
was absolutely insensible, and he never imagined
that those he trifled with or betrayed would see it in
that light. Nor had he the saving quality which
had prevented his father, to whom he was superior in
mental power, from incurring aU the ill-effects of his
Ul-advised actions. James had a natural shrewdness,
which was with him an instinct rather than real
wisdom, but which often served the purpose of the
latter. But shrewdness Charles had none. James
firmly believed in the absolute wisdom of his plans,
but when the crisis came he gave them up on the
appearance of danger (though not in time to save his
dignity), as if no such faith in them had ever existed.
Charles' faith in himself was more enduring, and
perhaps never really failed him till that terrible
moment when President Bradshaw rose to pronounce
the sentence of the High Court of Justice, and when
in broken and agitated sentences he first recognised
the hopelessness of his policy and the reality of his
danger. Closely connected in its origin with this
overweening self-confidence, was the sanguine tem
perament of Charles. This reasserted itself on the
smaUest encouragement, and on the most unsub
stantial grounds. The faintest gleam of prosperity,
the first indications of success in any favourite
scheme of policy seemed to upset the balance of his.
mind, and to excite him to the wUdest flights of
imagination. Every obstacle disappeared, every.

CHAELES THE FIRST. 339
possibility became a certainty in his eyes, and he
was wholly unable to conceal the existence of this
delusion from the observation of those whom it would
have been most desirable to keep in the dark. Under
its influence the most substantial bases of his policy
were cast aside as of secondary importance, and the
work of years was undone in a moment. His de
meanour assimilated itself to these false hopes, and
the arrogant insolence of his nature displayed itself
in its most offensive form. In fact, the manners of
Charles could as little bear the test of prosperity,
whether real or imaginary, as could his character.
He was never so undignifled, or showed himself to so
little advantage, as when he thought himself in an
assured position, and as independent of events as
irresponsible to public opinion. Adversity, on the
contrary, which destroys the morale of many men, or,
at any rate, impau'S their self-respect, and is fatal to
the ease and dignity of their bearing, exhibited
Charles in the most favourable light. Eeduced to
complete inaction by inexorable necessity, he was
saved from the consequences of his own ill-advised
action. His seU-confldence, which in prosperity
assumed such an unamiable and unattractive form,
exhibited, under these altered circumstances, all the
aspect of dignified self-respect. His proud nature
feU back upon itself, and the 'wise passiveness'
thus imposed upon him, became his greatest strength,
and has proved the best foundation for his reputation
z 2

340 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
in the eyes of posterity. The more complete the
restraint — the more hopeless his prospects — ^the more
helpless his ' gray discrowned head,' the nobler
became his bearing — the brighter grew his fame;
until at last, on ' that memorable scene ' at Whiter
hall, when every earthly hope had vanished, and all
possibility of weak or unworthy plotting had ceased,
he was more completely royal in his demeanour, and
more worthy of our respect than at any other epoch
of his life. At that moment he dropped the cloak of a
constitutional king which he had hitherto affected
to wear, and died with a steady eye, and unfaltering
tongue, asserting his real creed that ' a share in go
vernment ' is ' nothing pertaining ' to the People.
Notwithstanding his early physical debility, Charles
enjoyed many advantages of circumstance over his
father. James was always, to a considerable extent,
a foreigner in England, -with habits and modes of
thought formed in a very different state of society
from that with which he was brought into contact
on his accession to the throne of England. Charles,
though not actuaUy bom in England, came to this
country at so early an age that he was educated in
English associations, and might be expected to im
bibe a considerable amoimt of English sympathies,
if not of English prejudices. There was also some
thing in common between the serious tone of his
mind and the growing sentiment of the age.
Beyond the circle of courtiers and favourites in

CHARLES THE FIRST. 341
which James lived, the spirit of the nation was be
coming every year more earnest and more practical
in its apprehension of great principles and religious
convictions. That age of idealism was passing away,
where Sydney and Ealeigh and Devereux and Bacon
lived at the same time in two worlds, — one of romantic
perfection, in imagining which they indulged their
highest aspirations, and satisfied the cravings of
their deepest moral nature — the other, external and
common-place, in which they were content to live the
life and share the morals of the men around them.
The seventeenth century sought to amalgamate these
worlds of thought and action, and to bring forth the
morality of the closet into the walks of daUy life.
The nature of Charles was grave and thoughtful, he
had fixed ideas on religion and politics, and he was
bent, however imperfect and iU-assorted were the
methods he pursued, on realising those ideas, and on
bringing the national temperament into conformity
with them. But to become the director and leader of
a great national sentiment requires more than the
possession of a handsome face, a grave and decorous
bearing, and fair abiUties. It demands qualifications
in which Charles was utterly wanting, — honesty of
nature as weU as honesty of action, magnanimous
self-command, unselfishness in at least an intellectual
point of view, and elevation of spirit. But Charles's
mind was essentially warped from truthfulness; he
could rouse no faith and command no confidence in

342 ESTBIATFS OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
others, because he had no true principle of truth in
himself He had no scruple in deceiving others,
because he recognised no reciprocal obligations be
tween himself and other men. However he might
disguise it from himself, duty was -with him one-sided
only. Nor had he any magnanimity. He could
never forgive a supposed injury, and often he could
not suppress his continued sense of it, when it was
most important to his interests so to do. His temper
was far from being an even one, but, in accordance
with his nature, it was rather irritable than passionate;
and to those whom he disliked, or with whom he was
for the moment annoyed, his language and bear
ing were insolent rather than violent. By untimely
exhibitions of this irritable insolence he sometimes
marred the effects of a carefully planned system
of dissimulation, and effaced the memory of all his
previous insinuating gfaciousness. Thus his dis
simulation failed him exactly when it would have
served the part of a real virtue, and he reaped all
the discredit of resorting to it without any of the
fruits. He was thoroughly selfish in feeling and in
act, and his selfishness never assumed the shape of
more than a personal policy. He clung to VUUers
alone with faithfulness, because VUliers represented
exclusively his supposed personal interests, and
thoroughly identified himself with the personal
prejudices of his master. But he distrusted and
disliked men like Wentworth, who had a real national

CHARLES THE FIRST. 343
policy, in which the King was indeed to be made the
actuating and absolute mover, but in which the
King had to conform himself and his personal ca
prices to this national policy. He adhered to Angli
canism as a branch of his own personal judgment,
and from a profound sense of the necessary con
nection between its existence and his own personal
power. But when the opportunity seemed to offer
itself of raising a new CivU War in his own interests,
he had no scruple in abandoning the Church of
England (no doubt only temporarily in his own
mind) to the demands of the Scotch Presbyterians,
and by so doing destroyed aU the moral weight which
might have attached to his previous dogged refusals
to grant any concession on this point, when concession
would have placed him again on the throne of his
ancestors. Where his own selfish interest seemed to
him to be in conflict with the position or safety of
anyone, he sacrificed that person, if unwUlingly, at
any rate with a baseness of spirit which, in a man
who was physically courageous, betrays an inherent
lowness of nature. Fortunately for England, he
could never be long served successfully by really able
men, for if they succeeded so far as to gain an
independent reputation, the King, in his short-sighted
and poor-spirited jealousy, was never easy tUl he had
mortified them in the eyes of the world and paralysed
their action, though at the expense of his own most
important ends. Men of principle abandoned from

344 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
time to time the cause of his opponents, and from
¦parlous motives tend,ered him their services ; but in
proportion as they were men of principle, their
influence over his practical counsels was weak and
uncertain, for they had avowed allegiance to a
principle, and not to a King. A few good and true-
hearted men clung to him to the last, and believed in
him, in the enthusiasm of their loyal devotion to the
person of a King, and towards these men Charles was
as true and as generous in spirit as it was compatible
with his nature to be to anyone, for from their
unreserved devotion to him personally, they were in
his eyes part of himself. But he scrupled not to
sacrifice and dishonour such a true servant as the
Marquis of Ormond in his disgraceful intrigue with the
Irish Catholics through the Earl of Glamorgan — for
Ormond's steady adherence to the principles professed
but in practice abandoned by the King himself, was
a standing reproach to Charles. In such a case,
in fact, individuals went for nothing in the eyes of
Charles. He himself, in his immediate poUcy, was
everything. Charles was a faithful and uxorious husband to a
self-wUled and unfeeling wife, who had the religion
and morals of a French woman of rank of the Fronde
loeriod. But he asserted his independence occasionally
by refusing to foUow her advice exactly where and
when it would have been beneficial to his interests
to have complied. He never commanded her re-

CHAELES THE FIRST. 345
spect, and very seldom her sympathies, and she soon
found consolation for the little grief or remorse she
may have felt for his death in a private marriage
with a 'recognised lover. As a father, the conduct of
Charles was irreproachable, and here it is that the
sympathies of Englishmen gather most warmly and
most justifiably around him. Here the ice of his
character gave way, and his strongest opponents were
moved and staggered in their belief in his falseness
by the natural emotion he displayed in his interviews
with his unfortunate younger children. Nor can the
charge of deliberate cruelty, sometimes preferred
against him be sustained, except in a few cases of
personal vengeance. If he erred on this point, it was
in indifference to sufferings caused indirectly through
his conduct. Yet by his conduct he inflicted miseries
on England which bade fair to demoralise an entire
generation. He was trained in a bad school, but he
cannot escape on the most charitable psychological
interpretation of his conduct from a large amount of
personal moral responsibility for conscious and deli
berate evU-doing under the influence of an unscruplous
and selfish ambition. Yet, after all, it is the absence
of generous feelings and noble motives which lowers
the stamp of the character of Charles the First below
that of many Sovereigns who have actually done far
worse things, and which makes the historical student,
in proportion as his studies are deep and long-con
tinued, turn away from the contemplation of him

346 ESTIMATES "OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
with sentiments of increasing aversion, and feel an
increasing - conviction that, whatever judgment we
may pass on the men who condemned him to die the
death of a Traitor to the People of England, they
had at least this fact to justify them in their verdict,
that Charles had really been a traitor to some of the
most solemn trusts for which man is responsible, had
shown himself to be false and faithless in nearly
every public relation, and had forfeited aU claim to
be caUed a good man, while he must unhesitatingly
be adjudged a weak and bad King,

347

OLWEB, LOBD PBOTEGTOB.
I OFPEE no apology for preferring fact to pedantic
prejudice, and inserting the name of the Lord Pro
tector, OUver, among the Sovereigns of England,
though he did not bear the title of King, and
reached the supreme government of this country by
a very different process from the ordinary rule of
hereditary succession.
Great as have been the diversities in the moral
estimates of Oliver Cromwell put forth from time
to time by authors of standard authority, and by
orators of established reputation, the national senti
ment has never quite acquiesced in the reprobation
which has been the predominant feature of these
moral judgments, but has insisted on retaining, not
withstanding all that was aUeged against him on
other grounds, a more or less covert admiration for
him as one who raised England to a high position
among the nations of Europe. The memory of this
achievement, revived and strengthened by the igno
minious events of the period succeeding the Eesto
ration of the Stuarts, has stood the reputation of

348 ESTIMATES OP THF ENGLISH KINGS.
Oliver in good stead against the calumnies of a
period of triumphant reaction, and has almost proved
a match, in its purely traditionary form, for the
worst depreciations of party prejudice and eccle
siastical rancour. Wherever the sentimental con
ception of the character of Charles the First has not
been paramount, there has always been a certain
sympathy for his most determined opponent ; but it
was not tUl the present century that anything like
a critical attempt was made to ascertain the real
character of the man whose reputation had, up to
that time, been a strange mixture of traditionary
respect and profound horror. Much still remains to
be done, so far as concerns explanatory details, but
the broad features of the character can now be traced
with tolerable certainty, and the theories which are
irreconcUable with established facts can now be in
dicated with some assurance,
' I called not myself to this place,' Oliver declared
to his first Parliament ; ' I say again, I called not
myself to this place ! of that God is witness ; and I
have many witnesses who, I do believe, could lay
down their lives bearing witness to the truth of
that, — namely, that I caUed not myself to this place.
And being in it, I bear not witness to myself, but
God and the people of ,these nations have also borne
testimony to it. If my caUing be from God, and my
testimony from the people, God and the people shall
take it from me, else I will not part with it. I

OLIVER, LOED PROTECTOR. 349
should be false to the trust that God hath placed in
me, and to the interest of the people of these Nations
if I did.' With this emphatic declaration he pre
faces a brief but interesting statement, in his im
pressive though unpremeditated and inartistic style
of speaking, full of earnest and solemn appeals to the
corroborative knowledge of many of his hearers, and
of an omniscient God, as to the successive steps by
which he had risen to the position of Protector, in
vindication of the motives of his actions, and the
basis of his authority. According to the truth or
falsehood of this declaration, then, and to his own
actual belief in its truth, the character of the Pro
tector must in a great measure stand or fall, and our
decision between the conflicting reputations of him
as an ambitious and designing hypocrite and a true-
hearted and honest man must be really determined.
I shall therefore carefuUy keep this expository state
ment in mind in this attempt to analyse the man
from whose lips it proceeded.
Oliver Cromwell, as is now well known, was the
son of a gentleman living in the quiet little town of
Huntingdon, and who was the younger son of the
head of a county family of considerable landed pos
sessions, obtained from the favour of Henry the
Eighth. Whether Oliver's father added to a mode
rate income by the proceeds of a brewing business in
Huntingdon is more than doubtful, but in any case he
not only took a leading part in the municipal affairs

350 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
of the town, but lived close to the principal seat of his
family, and was on friendly terms with his elder
brother. All the connections, coUaterally or by
marriage, of Oliver's famUy, were also with county
and landed famUies, so that he is fuUy justified in
the fii'st words of his statement just referred to, — ' I
was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any con
siderable height, nor yet in obscurity.' The life and
daily influences of a small borough, then, modified
and supplemented by close connection and frequent
association with the life of landed proprietors, con
stituted the social atmosphere in which the character
of Oliver was developed during his earlier years.
Such a combination of social influences would tend
in any case towards breadth of social vision, and im
munity from the narrower prejudices of both country
and town. From the first his station rested on the
two principal bases on which English society is built
up, and he was thus naturally qualified, should his
capacity be equal to his opportunities, to become an
interpreter of each of these classes to the other, and
the intelligent moderator and ruler of both. The
education of a borough grammar-school was supple
mented, in his case, by the collegiate and probably
the legal studies of a member of the gentry class.
He' went to school with the future corporation and
townsmen of Huntingdon, he mixed at Cambridge
with the future landed proprietors and legislators of
aU England, and in London came into contact with

OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR. :351
the li-ving heart of the age. When he returned to
his native town, and settled down there in the
character of a young husband and householder, his
social and civic training was already a more than
usually complete one, and he soon afterwards feU
under a religious influence stUl more powerful and
significant. At what period exactly his character was
first affected in this direction we have no means
of ascertaining. The stories which have long been
inserted in ordinary biographies respecting his early
debauchery and ruinous extravagance are quite in
consistent with each other, and with the chronology
of the established facts of his early life ; and the
strong and remorseful language in which he himself
refers to his former reUgious indifference, and which
has been supposed to corroborate these stories, does
not by any means necessarUy bear this interpretation.
All that we need infer is that, up to a certain epoch,
Oliver paid little attention to the deeper and more
serious questions which are connected with the rela
tions between God and man, and which are insepa
rable from all real self-knowledge and knowledge of
other men, and an acquaintance with which is the
spring of aU the higher impulses of human action.
His higher nature remained stagnant and unde
veloped, his morality was merely conventional, and
his actions, if blameless in themselves, were guided
only by secondary and external considerations. He
accepted his morality and his religious creed from

352 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
his family and neighbours, and he conformed his
actions to the ordinary and customary standards of
the society in which he lived. The well-springs of
his own nature had never been drawn from, and his,
own life had in fact not yet commenced. How the
change did commence — whether the self-evolution
was convulsive but gradual, as his own expressions;
seem rather to indicate, and like the struggles, into
consciousness and renewed life of a man recovering
from drowning ; or whether it was a sudden revela
tion of unstirred forces, and unrecognised responsi-,
bUities; whether the dawning to the, perfect day was.
slow, and often dimmed by the mists and vapours of,
departing night, or whether the gleam of light from
above which disclosed the truth, and the conviction.
of that truth were simultaneous — we can only con
jecture. AU that we know is, that the revolution
seriously affected his bodily health, and for a time
seemed to threaten the subversion of the intellect
itself. The depths and capabUities of the nature
thus aroused were indeed so great that the mind of
the man himseK reeled under this new birth, Dr,
Simcott, of Huntingdon, and Sir Theodore Mayerne,
the Court physician in London, both prescribed for
him as a hypochondriac. Gradually, however, his
mind became clearer and more composed. The
exaggerated and overwhelming sense of past alie
nation from God gradually gave way to an earnest,
reliance on the active assistance and guardianship of

OLIVER, LORD PEOTECTOE. 353
Divine Love, which he never again lost in aU the
trials of his subsequent career. His bodily constitu
tion, also, though perhaps never fundamentaUy strong,
and undermined by the unhealthy air of the Fens,
became outwardly robust, and capable, under the
influence of a powerful wiU, of undergoing a great
amount of physical exertion.
One of those who had been attached to his house
hold when he was Lord Protector, Mr. John Maidston,
writing to Governor Winthrop, in New England,
at the end of March, 1660, when the Presbyterian
Members had resumed their seats in the Long Parlia
ment, under the authority of Monk, and the Eesto
ration was no longer doubtful, has given a most
striking delineation of Oliver, as he knew him, or as
he appeared to him. ' His body,' he says, ' was well-
compact and strong, his stature under six foot (I
believe about two inches), his head so shaped as you
might see it a storehouse and shop both of a vast
treasury of natural parts.' The Eoyalist, Sir Philip
Warwick, recalling in later years his recollection pf
the first time when he saw Oliver at the commence
ment of the Long ParUament, speaks of his ' stature '
as ' of a good size, his countenance swollen and red
dish, his voice sharp and untunable, and his elo
quence fuU of fervour,' and complains that he was
' very much hearkened unto.' The portrait painted
by Sir Peter Lely towards the close of Oliver's life,
which appears to me to correspond best to my con-
A A

:3_54 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
.ception of the real man, is quite in harmony with
Maidston's descriptio4, and lends strength to the
theory as to the original from whom MUton drew
his portrait of Adam : —
His fair large front and eye sublime declar'd
Absolute rule ; and hyaeinthine locks
Eound from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad.
The massive breadth of the forehead, and the large
roughly-cut nose give an impression of intellectual
ability and natural leadership, which is confirmed and
yet modified in its character by the other features
of the countenance. The eyes, fuU of composed and
deep thoughtfulness, yet concentrated and imperative
in their almost threatening look of searching scrutiny,
seem to intimate the same poise of the intellect and
the emotions which is expressed by the full, firm,
nervous mouth and powerfuUy rounded chin, in which,
-with all their strength, there is not a touch of sinister
hardness, or insolent brutality. The impression left
by the face as a whole is of weU-ordered though pas
sionate force of character ; and the feeling it is calcu
lated to inspire is not that of terrified aversion, but
of deep and overpowering awe. To such a man as
this picture seems to portray, it would be very difficult
to say ho ; but there is that in the face which appears
also to warrant the conviction that moral courage
would be the safest and readiest road to his sympathy
and protection. It is the face of one with whom
absolute authority was an incident of his nature,

OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR. 855
rather than an impulse of personal will — ^who was an
instinctive rather than a voluntary autocrat. That
this instinct of command was a leading characteristic
of Oliver, of the existence of which he was himself
from time to time even painfully conscious, and from
the opportunities and necessity of which he often
struggled to escape as from a temptation, no one
who has studied his actions at all deeply can entertain
a doubt. An unfriendly writer testifies to the earnest
ness with which he endeavoured to dissuade Fairfax
from his obstinate resolution to surrender the chief
command of the army on the breach with the Scotch
Covenanters when they proclaimed the King of Scots.
And I believe that his. own declaration to his first
Protectoral Parliament as to his conduct after the
crowning victory at Worcester is quite true : ' I say
to you, I hoped to have had leave to retire to a pri
vate life. I begged to be dismissed of my charge ;
I begged it again and again; and God be Judge
between me and aU men, if I lie in this matter.
That I Ue not in matter of fact, is known to very
many; but whether I teU a lie in my heart, as
labouring -to represent to you what was not upon
my heart, I say, the Lord be Judge ! Let uncha
ritable men, who measure others by themselves,
judge as they please ! But I could not obtain what
my soul longed for,' He affirms — and, I beUeve,
•with equal truth — the same desire to have been a
m^in cause of his summoning the 'Little Parliament'
t. i.2

856 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS,
after the dissolution of the Long Parliament. 'A
chief end to myself was to lay down the power which
was in my hands. I say to you again, in the presence
of that God who hath blessed and been with me in
aU my adversities and successes, that was as to my
self my greatest end ! A desire, perhaps, I am afraid
sinful enough, to be quit of the power God had most
clearly by his Providence put into my hands, before
he called me to lay it down, before these honest ends
of our fighting were attained and settled ! I say the
authority I had in my hand, being so boundless as it
was. By Act of Parliament I was Lord General of all
the Forces in the three nations of England, Scotland,
and Ireland .... in which unlimited condition I
did not desire to live a day.' His answer to a letter
from Cardinal Mazarin, written at this crisis, testifies
curiously how fruitlessly he endeavoured to reduce
himself in his own eyes to the position of a simple
private individual, and to hold back his hand from
the guiding helm of State,
But although he retained, as a rule, the control
over his autocratic inclination, or by convulsive
efforts sought to relieve himself from its temptations,
in aU probability the decisions and actions of his life
were more or less affected by it, and at times were,
under its influence, warped from the standard of
justice and right. Passing over the doubtful case of
his forcible dissolution of the Long Parliament, in
which he acted, no doubt, whether justifiably or not.

OLIVER, LOED PEOTECTOE. 357
on the impulse of the moment, and without any
clearly premeditated design, and the terrible scene at
Drogheda, as to which his own despatch to the
Speaker shows evident moral misgivings, we seem to
trace the occasional predominance of the impatient
spirit of conscious ability in some of those arbitrary
acts during his Protectorate, in which he sacrificed
the privUeges of his Parliaments and the liberties
of individuals to the professed necessities of the
situation. A good deal may be urged with plausi
bility in defence of these questionable proceedings,
and in proof that the necessity was real and urgent ;
but they nevertheless leave behind, on the mind of an
impartial observer, a suspicion that their real expla
nation lies in the autocratic and passionate nature of
the Protector himself, which sometimes broke through
the restraints of his better judgment, and sometimes
created the very necessity which in his self-deception
he alleged as his excuse. To such cases, and similar
backsUdings on other points from the moral standard
by which he professed to be actuated, and to which,
I believe, his actions were generally conformed, the
remark applies with which Maidston concludes his
discriminating estimate already alluded to: — 'He
lived and died in comfortable communion with God,
as judicious persons near him well observed. He
was that Mordecai that sought the welfare of his
people and spake peace to his seed. Yet were his
temptations such, as it appeared frequently that he

358 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
that had grace enough for many men, may have top
little for himself, the treasure he had being but in
an earthen vessel, and that equaUy defiled with ori
ginal sin as any other man's nature is.' The exact
proportion between the temptations resisted and the
temptations yielded to in the case of Oliver Cromwell
can, of course, never be satisfactorily determined,
nor do I pretend to draw either a perfect ruler or a
faultless man ; but it is important to observe that one
who saw the failures, had no doubt at the same time
as to the general bias of the character. ' His temper
was exceeding fiery,' Maidston himself says, 'as I
have known, but the flame of it kept down, for the
most part, or soon allayed with those moral endow
ments he had. He was naturaUy compassionate
towards objects in distress, even to an effeminate
measure ; though God had made him a heart wherein
was left little room for any fear but what was due to
himself, of which there was a large proportion, yet did
he exceed in tenderness towards sufferers. A larger
soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay
than his was. I do believe, if his story were impar-
tiaUy transmitted, and the unprejudiced world weU
possessed with it, she would add him to her nine
worthies, and make up that number a Decemviri.'
The temptations of a period of revolution to a man
who is conscious of the capacity to govern are so
great, that no one who has not examined into the
credibility of the evidence which is often thought to

OLIVEE, LOED PROTECTOR. 359
afford convincing proof of the designing and selfish
ambition of OUver, and has seen it again and again
disappear on an application of the ordinary tests of
truth and falshood, can acquire that confidence in the
general rectitude and anxious disinterestedness of
his conduct which can entitle him to regard the devi
ations from right as the marked exceptions to the
general rule, and to pronounce a favourable moral
verdict on the character of the man as a whole. Such
a verdict however may, I believe, be safely given in
the case of Oliver Cromwell. In contrast with
the almost single case of apparent cruelty and blood-
thirstiness at the capture of Drogheda, stand not
only repeated acts of clemency and compassion, but
the testimony of his most prejudiced opponents as to
his general aversion to cruelty and to blood-shedding,
and his habitual magnanimity. Those only will
render the decision doubtful as to his moral estima
tion who insist on attributing to him an ideal cha
racter of pure faultlessness, at the expense of the
reputation of aU the great men with whom he came
into political collision, and of the dictates of justice
and humanity.
This general predominance of self-restraint and
moderation in the conduct of Oliver was greatly aided
by another quality of his natural disposition, which
those have lost sight of who rest his claims to admi
ration on the commanding influences of a strong will.
Though his imperial capacity might sometimes make

360 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
him impatient of opposition and mismanagement, he
possessed also, in a large measure, the moderation and
the patience which spring from a wide and far-sighted
perception of the situation ini aU its aspects. The
same power which enabled him to apprehend so
quickly and so justly the true ends to be pursued,
and the best ways to those ends, gave him also a
sympathetic insight into the different light in which
the same questions might present themselves to the
minds and feelings of other men equally conscientious
and equally eager to achieve the same substantial
end. Seldom, if ever, has so emotional a nature, so
strong a will, and so consciously superior an intellect
been so tolerant of the weakness and hesitations of
others, A natural insight into character, slightly
weakened, perhaps, by a leaning towards the most
charitable construction of doubtful features, gave him
a power of appealing to common feelings and aspira
tions in those whose outward action was most inhar
monious with his own. Strong in himself, he pre
ferred to disarm rather than to crush opposition. The
prominence of the few occasions on which he overcame
his opponents by an appeal to force has misled readers
of history into the idea that this was his habitual
mode of action ; and many eloquent words have been
wasted both on his supposed heroic contempt for
formularies and shams, and on the baseness of the
triumph in his success of brute force over thoughtful
conscientiousness. But, in fact, with the capacity

OLIVER, LOED PROTECTOR. 361
and natural impulses of an autocrat, Oliver possessed
the truest appreciation of the inferiority intellectually
as well as morally of Force to Eeason. A resort to
the former he always regarded as a confession
of weakness, as mortifying to his own inteUectual
pride as it was distasteful to his keen moral percep
tions, and which, if resorted to through supposed
necessity, was to be renounced at the earliest oppor
tunity. No one would have sympathised more
lieartUy with the exclamation attributed to the great
Italian statesman of this century, in his last mo
ments : ' I wiU have no state of siege [i.e. martial
law] , Any fool can govern with that ! ' Writers on
history, while dweUing on his violent and arbitrary
acts, have forgotten to observe the numberless cases
in which he eschewed the violence, and shrank from
the absolutism. To him who studies history in its
processes as well as in its results, a close consideration
of the events of the period from the King's flight from
Oxford, in the spring of 1646, to the fatal scene at
Whitehall in January, 1649, or again, from Worces
ter fight to the violent scene at Westminster, will
reveal in Oliver Cromwell an amount of wise patience
and self-denying forbearance unequalled in the case
of any man similarly placed. Or, turning to the very
point on which his character as a statesman as well
as a lover of constitutional freedom may be most easily
assailed — his treatment of his own Parliamentss — do
we not recognise, in the very existence of those sue-

362 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
cessive Parliaments, the strongest indication of the
spirit of a constitutional statesman ? If he failed, or,
rather, had not at the time of his death succeeded in
his attempts to create a Eepresentative assembly of
the nation, which might share and not monopolise the
seats of legislature and judicature, and which, on the
other hand, might secure the foundations of society
in a different spirit from that of a blind supporter of
old abuses or of a religious persecutor, we ought not
to ignore the wisdom and foresight which saw in his
own absolute authority only a transitional necessity,
which never ceased to seek expedients by which it
might be safely resigned, and preferred the mortifi
cations and immediate dangers of his reiterated ex
periments to the immediate security and the already
assured popularity of an uncontroUed personal govern
ment. It is this voluntary preference of mixed and
limited government to absolutism, under any name,
however specious, that constitutes the specific cha
racteristic of Oliver as a Civil Euler, and which pre
serves the moral identity of the man who opposed and
overthrew the selfish and ineradicable despotism of
Charles the First, with the man who himself subse
quently dissolved and decimated Parliaments, and
violated the personal freedom of the subject. It was
a certain perception of this identity which rendered
Oliver's most arbitrary proceedings endurable, and
even not distasteful to the great body of the English
nation, and created that general confidence in his

OLIVEE, LORD PROTECTOR. 363
purposes as well as his ability, which justified him
in basing his authority on the will of the People as
weU as the special call of God,
But the moderating influence which, probably more
than anything else, kept in check the strong will and
conscious capacity for government of Oliver CromweU
was the conviction which he entertained that he
was only an instrument in the hand of God, and:
that it was even more a crime to anticipate the
leadings of Providence than it was wilfuUy to
disregard them. He was fully impressed with the
belief that it was the duty of the ablest man to wait
patiently for the manifestation of the occasion for
his especial work in this world, while his equaUy
strong belief that, should he engage in any merely
selfish and uninvited undertaking, the protecting
power of God would be withdrawn from him operated
to a great extent to restrain any natural tendency to"
interpret as a caU from Heaven the mere promptings
of his own ambition. A character which is actuated
by guiding ideas such as these requires indeed the
background and substratum of a strong understand
ing, a clear head, and an extensive knowledge of men
and things, to prevent it from degenerating uito that
of a Fanatic. But in Oliver the Puritan ideal of a
practical faith realised in the affairs of ordinary life
was so entirely paramount, that it was impossible for
him to dissociate the lessons of worldly wisdom of
that school in which he was being daily taught from

864 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the higher principles and impulses of his spiritual
life. Both blended in every judgment he formed;
and in what is considered to be the contrariety of
the natural tendencies of each lay the strength and
security of the conclusions which he drew from their
combination. The same -width of view and discernment of the
realities of things which harmonised his worldly
wisdom and his higher promptings in the greater
affairs of life, gave him also a true perception of the
relations of what are called worldly pleasures to the
higher nature of man, and raised him as much above
the asceticism of a religious enthusiast as above the
careless licentiousness of the jovial Cavalier, His
advice to his son Eichard, in a letter to Eichard's
-wife, is to ' be above the pleasures of this life, and
outward business, and then you shaU have the true
use and comfort of them, and not otherwise,' and by
this rule he regulated his own social habits. He had
naturally a strong sense of humour. ' Oliver loves
an innocent jest,' says one of his soldiers, and his
daUy life, as well as his letters, breathe a spirit of
manly cheerfulness. He had received a good educa
tion, and he maintained and carried out the studies
to which he had been thus introduced. He directs
the attention of his son Eichard to the study of his
tory and mathematics and ' cosmography,' and he
recommends in particular Ealeigh's ' History of the
World ' as being ' a body of history,' and therefore

OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR. 365
more instructive than mere fragments. These pur
suits, he adds, ' fit for public services, for which a
man is born.' Contemporaries tell us of the ' noble
Ubrary' that he formed, and one who was present
bears testimony that Oliver was more than a match
for the Scotch Commissioners at their own dialec
tic arguments from Mariana and Buchanan. He
was a warm friend to the two older Universities, and
the planner of a new one at Durham for the
northern counties. He sought out and he was the
generous patron or considerate friend of the best
scholars and most cultivated men of the age, indepen
dently of party or personal prejudice. The arts of
painting and music were both appreciated and pa
tronised by him, and of the latter he was so fond that
it might almost seem as if here we had something of
the blood of the Welsh Williams, from whom he was
said to be descended. He could discriminate between
the use and abuse of dramatic representations, and
Davenant received especial permission to perform
his comedies under his protection. In the aid which
he gave to the publication of Walton's Polyglot Bible
he showed that, with all his devotion to the words of
Scripture, he was superior to the weak misgivings of
some of the most eminent of the Puritan divines as
to the unsettlement of the text. His tastes and his
appreciations were as broad as his sympathies, and
as a consequence he drew around his person the best

366 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
men, and from their ranks filled his councils and the
general administration of the three kingdoms..
The breadth of mind which was the source of
Oliver's wonderful patience and consideration for
others made him also incapable of retaining resent
ment to those who had been his personal opponents,
and even induced him to regard with kindly tolerance
those who were most opposed to him in political
matters, as soon as the crisis had passed which ren
dered a hostUe attitude towards them necessary on
his .part. He not only acted in the spirit of that
piece of worldly advice, always to treat your enemy
of to-day as if he might become your friend of to
morrow, but could go further, and regard with com
placency the continued spirit of hostility as long as
it did not force itself on his notice in the shape of
acts of aggression ; and even then his endurance was
great if the motives of the aggressor, though mis
taken, were disinterested. Among all the charges
which have been brought against him there is none
of revengeful implacabUity. He knew too weU the
force of early circumstances, and of the bias of natu
ral character, ever to pass the same condemnation
on the men themselves that he pronounced on their
principles and the cause they espoused. As soon as
they ceased to be immediately dangerous, they ceased
also with him to be objects of any personal dislike.
The one great idea of pursuing the work to which.

OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR. 367
he beUeved he had been specially caUed was with
him so over-mastering, that what was personal to
himself seemed transitory and unimportant. It was
observed by an attendant on his last hours, that he
was then so carried away by solicitude for the future
welfare of the nation, whose highest interests he be
lieved had been entrusted to his care, that he seemed
in his prayers to forget entirely his own family. And
this was the case with a man whose domestic affec
tions were, it is universally admitted, strong in no
ordinary degree.
It is scarcely necessary for me to do more than
simply advert to that religious toleration which found
in OUver CromweU, from that same largeness of
mind and sympathies, one of its most determined
and consistent advocates. He had that rare faculty
in a strong believer of recognising the right of others
to believe differently from himself, and he not only
guided all his earlier career by this principle, but
made it the foundation of his subsequent government,
and the key-stone of his foreign policy. As he him
self said, 'God give us hearts and spirits to keep
things equal ! which truly, I must profess to you,
hath been my temper. I have had some boxes and
rebukes on the one hand, and, on the other, some
censuring me for Presbytery, others as an inletter to
aU the sects and heresies of the nation. I have borne
my reproach, but I have, through God's mercy, not

368 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
been unhappy in hindering any one religion to impose
upon another.' Even in the case of Eoman Catholics,
where the strongest prejudices of his early training
and the complication of ultramontane pretensions
embarrassed the question, and suggested doubts of
the applicabUity of this great principle, the progress
of time and the lessons of an enlarged experience
taught him much, and in his own words to Cardinal
Mazarin, ' I have of some, and those very many, had
compassion, making a difference. Truly I have made
a difference and, as Jude speaks, "snatched many
out of the fire," the raging fire of persecution, which
did tyrannise over their consciences, and encroached
by an arbitrariness of power upon their estates.
And herein it is my purpose, as soon as I can remove
impediments and some weights that press me down,
to make some further progress.'
Of the general government of the Lord Protector
it is not necessary to say much. Its merits have
been recognised even by the strongest political op
ponents, and those who were most prejudiced against
his character have acknowledged that his rule only
wanted the stamp of legitimacy to entitle it to nearly
unmixed praise. There is scarcely a subject, indeed, to
which modern legislation has been applied, to which
the hand or the eye of the Protector wUl not be found
to have been directed, and on which the principles
laid down and partly carried into practice by him,

UldVliE, LOED PEOTECTOE. 369
have not now been adopted. He was wise before his
age, but he was also wise with a fuU consideraiton of
the feelings and requirements of his age. He might
anticipate like a philosopher, but he acted as a
practical though far-seeing statesman. At home
many men might detest the foundations of his au
thority, but they felt confidence in the justice and
wisdom of his administration, while abroad he was
feared and respected by all. Had he lived a little
longer, there seems every probabUity that the wise
eclecticism which he had adopted alike in his advocacy
of principles and in his choice of men, would have
consolidated around his throne a party, bound to
gether by sympathies more enduring than the
transient ties of party and dogmatic antecedents,
and comprising -within its ranks the representative
elements of what was most influential and sterling
in the national character, which, under his guiding
mind, would have commanded more and more en
tirely the national confidence. For such an ad
ministration, whatever its shortcomings might have
been in practice, the animating principle laid down
by their great chief must have secured a certain
elevation of spirit and a certain depth of root. ' A
thing I am confident our liberty and prosperity
depend upon — Eeformation. Make it a shame to see
men bold in sin and profaneness, and God wUl bless
you. You wiU be a blessing to the nation ; and by
B B

.37Q ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
this -wiU be more repairers of breaches than by any
thing in the world. Truly, these things do respect
the souls of men, and the spirits — which are the men.
The mind is the man. If that be kept pure, a man
signifies somewhat ; if not, I would very fain see what
difference there is between him and a beast. He
hath only some activity to do some more mischief.'

371

BIGHABD, LOBD PBOTEGTOB.
We have had occasion to notice more than once how
unfavourable to greatness, or at least the recognition
of greatness, is the position of the son of a dis
tinguished man. The continuity of genius which
seems to be expected is seldom carried out, for even
if the amount of abUity in the second generation at
all approaches that in the preceding, it is often of so
different a type that public expectation is almost as
much disappointed as if there had been no succession
of abiUty at all. In the case of Eichard CromweU,
however, there was an entire absence of genius in
any form, and the effect of the contrast which is
naturaUy suggested between him and his father has
been such, that he has been denied the possession of
even the amount of mental acquirements to which he
can reaUy lay claim. The circumstance that he was
the least energetic, if not also the least able, of the
sons of the Protector Oliver would not, perhaps, have
been so fatal to his qualifications for retaining the
supreme power in the kingdom, if he had been from
the first the eldest son. But two brothers who
B B 2

372 ESTIMATES OF THE. ENGLISH KINGS.
attained to youth and early manhood enjoyed succes
sively this position before their death made Eichard
the heir of the family. Eobert, the eldest son, as
Mr. Forster has proved, did not die tUl May, 1639,
when he was in his eighteenth year ; Oliver, the
second son, certainly survived long enough to take a
commission in the Parliamentary Army when he
had nearly completed his twentieth year, and not
improbably lived for some years longer. Eichard
was nearly four years younger than this second eldest
.son, and at the time of the breaking out of the Ci-vil
War was only a boy who had not completed his six
teenth year. Writers have speculated very much as
to the cause of his not taking a more active part in
the events of the Civil War, forgetting how young he
was ; and unless he had exhibited a marked amount
of enterprise and capacity, it is not likely that there
would be any attempt made to put forward prema
turely a younger son. The first CivU War, indeed,
which was the one the exigencies of which might
have demanded his active co-operation, ended before
he was twenty. His eldest brother Eobert had been
the favourite and hope of his father, and the younger
Oliver must then, as the soldier head of the family
and the Protector's companion in his campaigns,
have necessarUy held the first place. Eichard, natu
rally unaspiring, and contented with the happy life
he led in the home circle and the mixed society of
London, was not likely to thrust himself on the

EICHARD, LORD PROTECTOR, 373
attention of his father, wrapped up as the latter
was in the absorbing affairs of public life. It seems
tmlikely that he was that son of Lieutenant-General
CromweU who is described as being, in October,
1647, ' Captain of the General's Life Guard,' or the
' other son ' who is mentioned as then ' captain of a
troop in Colonel Harrison's regiment,' for in the May
of that year, when nearly twenty-one years of age,
he was entered at Lincoln's Inn (Thurloe, his future
Secretary of State," being one of his sureties), — and
there had been no special caU to active service in the
meantime. His father's serious attention was pro
bably first directed to him when negotiations for a
marriage were entered into on his behalf at the be
ginning of the year 1648 — first, with the Hungerfords,
and afterwards (successfuUy) with the Maiiors of
Hursley, in Hampshire. TiU that time his character
Would be of secondary importance, and he would be
ooked upon in his family as a mere boy. From the
fact of the negotiations being in behalf of Bichard,
young Oliver seems to have been already dead. The
attention of the father was then drawn to the fact
that Eichard, whatever were his merits, was wholly
wanting in that weight of character which befitted,
in his opinion, every Englishman, and which certainly
he would wish to see in any son of his own, and par
ticularly in the future head of the famUy. This
made him, no doubt, especiaUy careful as to the
choice he made for his son — ^the offer of the Hunger-

874 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
fords, a family half Eoyalist, half Presbyterian,
though much greater than that of the Maiiors, being
rejected on account of ' difference of ties,' and not
Jhe same ' assurance of godliness ' in parents and
daughter. The negotiation with Mr. Maiior, how
ever, was a protracted one, being much interrupted
by the campaign of 1648, as well as by the necessity
pf providing in the marriage arrangements, against
evil days in a family so precariously situated as that
of the Cromwells. But Eichard,' we learn from hia
father's letters, had ' a great desire to come do-wn
and wait on ' Dorothy Maiior, and ' minded that
more than to attend to business ' at home ; Oliver
himself was desirous to complete the matter before
Jie started on his Irish campaign, and on the 1st
of May, 1649, the marriage was solemnized. The
letters which passed during the succeeding years in
the new family circle thus formed give us the only
insight we possess into Eichard's character at this
period of his life. I have already referred to the
advice conveyed in one or two of these letters respect
ing his pursuits and mode of life, and we have seen how
his father endeavoured to rouse him to a stronger
sense of the demands of his situation in life and to
the higher purposes of existence. In the midst of
his most serious affairs of, State, Oliver never ceases
to reiterate his. counsels, and to repeat his entreaties
to Mr. Maiior to second his efforts with Eichard.
¦' Idleness ' seems to be the established characteristic

¦ EICHARD, LOED PEOTECTOE. 375
of the latter in his father's eyes, who, however, writes
playfully rather than seriously on that point. He
was not without some encouragement in his efforts —
some letters from Eichard ' had a good savour,' — the
father ' took them kindly, and liked expressions when
they came plainly from the heart, and were not
strained or affected ; ' but he ' needed good counsel ;
he was in the dangerous time of his age, and it
was a very vain world.' Oliver uses every variety of
-tone, from the most playful banter to the most
solemn adjuration, and endeavours to enlist Dorothy
also in the efforts he is making for her husband's
guidance. But Eichard, though excellent in his
intentions, was careless and extravagant; he got
into debt and borrowed money from his father-in-law,
and in the middle of the year 1651 his conduct
elicited the foUowing observations from his father
addressed to Mr. Maiior : — ' I hear my son hath ex
ceeded his allowance, and is in debt. Truly I cannot
commend him therein ; wisdom requiring his living
-within compass, and calling for it at his hands. And,
in my judgment, the reputation arising from thence
would have been more real honour than what is at
tained the other way. I believe vain men wiU speak
weU of him that does iU. I desire to be understood
that I grudge him not laudable recreations, nor an
honourable carriage of himself in them ; nor is any
matter of charge like to fall to my share a stick with
me. Truly I can find in my heart to aUow him nOt

376 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
only a sufficiency, but more for his good. But if
pleasure and self-satisfaction be made the business
of a man's life, so much cost laid out upon it, so
much time spent on it, as rather answers appetite
than the wUl of God, or is comely before his saints,
I scruple tp feed this humour ; and God forbid that
his being my son should be his claim to live not
pleasingly to our heavenly Father, who hath raised
me out of the dust to be what I am. I desire your
faithfulness (he being also your concernment as weU
as mine) to advise him to approve himself to the
Lord in his course of life, and to search his statutes
for a rule to conscience, and to seek grace from
Christ to enable him to walk therein. This hath life
in it, and -will come to somewhat ; what is a poor
creature without this? This will not abridge of
lawful pleasures, but teach such a use of them as
will have the peace of a good conscience going along
with it. Sir, I write what is in my heart ; I pray
you communicate my mind herein to my son, and be
his remembrancer in these things. Truly I love him ;
he is dear to me, and so is his -wife, and for their
sakes do I thus write. They shall not want comfort
or encouragement from me, so far as I may afford it.
But indeed I cannot think I do weU to feed a volup
tuous humour in my son, if he should make pleasure
the business of his life, in a time when some precious
saints are bleeding and breathing out their last for
the safety of the rest. Sir, I beseech you, believe I

RICHARD, LORD PROTECTOR, 377
here say not this to save my purse, for I shall
wiUingly do what is convenient to satisfy his occa
sions as I have opportunity. But as I pray he may
not walk in a course not pleasing to the Lord, so it
lieth upon me to give him in love the best counsel I
may, and I know not how better to convey it to him
than by so good a hand as yours. Sir, I pray you,
acquaint him with these thoughts of mine. And re
member my love to my daughter, for whose sake I
shall be induced to do any reasonable thing.'
I have quoted this admonition of the Protector
Oliver at some length, because it exhibits more
clearly than any other statement the real defects
in Eichard's character, and the anxiety which they
produced in his father's mind. He had not a spark
of genius, and he had no sustained elevation of pur
pose; but he was neither the fool, nor the poor-
spirited, cowardly man that is commonly supposed.
He was only an easj-temi^eved pococurante, thoroughly
contented with any situation in which he found
himself placed by circumstances or the wUl of others,
seeking only to avoid the necessity of change or de
cided action as long as possible, and though not un
mindful of the course of events, and well acquainted
with the facts of the situation, always hoping that
something would arise which might prevent the
necessity of his acting, or of his taking any but the
least irksome and most pleasant line of action. He
'had considerable pleasantry and dry humour, but as

§78 ESTIMfATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
little brilliancy in his' wit as he had of capacity to com
mand the political situation in more serious matters.
He w'as universally popular among his neighbours in
Hampshire as a genial and accomplished country
gentleman. His horses and his dogs were his great
delight, and his constant occupations were hawking
and hunting and the ordinary pleasures of a country
life. These tastes he preserved to the close of his
long life, keeping his harriers after his return to
Hursley from the Continent and Cheshunt, and
riding out with the hounds, it is said, with unabated
spirit when he was eighty years of age. He made
no distinction of parties in his social intercourse, —
his father's example would tend to confirm his
natural disposition in this respect — but he lived so
much on the same friendly terms with all, that it is
not surprising that he was thought to possess no fixed
political or religious views of his own. Yet he was
hot a thoughtless man on such matters. He fuUy
appreciated his father's principles, both religious and
political, and had a great tenacity in such matters,
which contrasts curiously with his want of enterprise
when their interests were at stake, and when it lay
with him to secure those interests. There seems to
be no foundation for the stories of his being licentious
in his morals, and it is clear from his father's letter
that no rumour of anything of that sort had reached
him. • AU the testimony which has been preserved as
to his doings at Hursley, from those who knew him

EICHARD, LOED PROTECTOR. 379
there, represents him as leading a perfectly innocent
if unmeaning life. At a subsequent period of his
life he is said to have attended on Sundays at the
single service given at the parish church of Hursley,
and at another time of the day at the Baptist chapel
at Eomsey. Long after the Eestoration of the King
he maintained an intimate friendship with his former
chaplain, Mr. Howe, and visited him on his death
bed, the parting between them being described as very
affecting. When his father was on his death-bed,
and just before the cares of sovereignty were trans
ferred to his own shoulders, he wrote a letter to his
friend and connection by marriage, Captain John
Duneji, on the death of two common friends, which
is not wanting in dignity, and shows a spirit suffi
ciently serious and thoughtful when his mind was
directed to such topics. 'I received your last sad
intelligence,' he writes, ' of the death of St. Barbe and
his lady. I am persuaded they are out of a trouble
some world, and certainly happy ; the loss is not so
much theu'S as their neighbours'. The stroke of
death is so forcible that the strongest cannot stand
against it ; no weapons of the flesh to encounter the
grave ; they must be spiritual. Such I hope they
had (by the grace of God) to make a victory, to
charge through into the place of their wishes and
glory. His friendship wiU make me to rejoice in his
and his wife's happiness. It is a providential stroke,
and ought to teach the most healthy and happy. I

380 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KING?.
am fuUy persuaded the country hath a loss in him
and I also, — they as wanting one that would assist
them in difficulties ; I as a friend.' He then refers
to the dangerous state in which his father lay, and
the slight hopes raised by a fit of ague, * shaU it
please God to go on with his gentle hand, and bring
him temperately out of this fit ; ' which result, he
says, would be ' a new life to his Highness, and the
affairs as they now stand of this nation, with the
Protestant interest of Christendom. I believe,' he
continues, ' the rumour of this dangerous illness hath
flown into aU parts of this nation, and hath caused
several persons of ill-affection to prick up their ears,
which will cause friends to be vigUant, for they wUl
hope they have a game to play. It is a time that
wiU discover aU colours, and much of the disposition
of the nation may be now gathered. I hear that
those that have been enemies, others that have been
no friends, some of both, are startled, fearing their
possessions, and worser conditions, not considering
their affection, in this hazard his Highness is in. It
must be the goodness of God that shall save him,
and his knowledge of the state of England and of
Christendom; the spirit of prayer which is poured
out for him, and the faith which is acted on behalf
of him, give us the best comfort and hopes.'
This is not the letter of one who was a fool, or who
was unacquainted -with the nature and bearings of the
crisis in which he would have to take the principal

aiOnjuiu, IjUHV i'KOTECTdB, 381
part, should his father's Ulness terminate fatally;
But the position of Eichard at the death of the
Protector Oliver was one which demanded a rare
combination of qualities to enable him to maintain
his power. He, on the contrary, had little more
than the passive virtues. PersonaUy he would rouse
dislike nowhere, but when it was roused against his
Government there was nothing in him to resist or
overcome it, unless it were the mere persistence of
inertia. The successor to a newly-founded dynasty
is always in a precarious position, for that feeling
of a distinct and superior caste which is the great
secret of the authority of an hereditary king, as such,
over the nation he is caUed to govern, has not had
yet time to root itself in the popular mind, while the
other support to a new throne, the personal ascend
ancy of the great foimder, is gone. The successor
is stUl looked upon as one of the caste from which
the founder raised himself, and, as is well known,
every caste in society is distrustful and intolerant of
the rule of one of its own members. The artisan
prefers the leadership of the employer of labour ; the
middle class man (however he may caU for mid&le-
class rule) has more satisfaction in the ascendancy
.and more consideration for the short-coming of the
aristocrat ; and the nation, as a whole, prefers and
bears with much more from the heir of its hereditary
kings than from any scion of a new reigning family.
What was looked upon as natural indifference in

823 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS,
Charles Stuart the younger would be criticised as
indolent incapacity in Eichard CromweU; and the
pleasant, personal manners which were the source of
unbounded popularity in the case of the former,
would be underrated in the latter, and regarded as
the condescension of a pa/rvenu from the proper
.dignity of a king, Oliver had probably been long
distracted in his resolution as to the successor he
should name. On the one side were the elements of
authority attaching to even the first step in . an he
reditary descent of the Crown ; on the other hand,
was the character of Eichard himself. Yet even
this, as it wotdd not provoke opposition, might con
cUiate public opinion by a judicious distribution of
the Administrative and Cabinet appointments, and
¦by a balance of the conflicting powers of the Puritan
party. Such a scheme constituted probably the con
tents of the paper which Oliver is said to have
mentioned on his death-bed, as his final disposition,
but which could not be found. He had then at that
dying moment nothing further to say than that
'Eichard' was to be the new head of the Govern
ment; the paper might be discovered; if not, the
result must be left in the hands of Providence.
Eichard, on his accession, had a natural party, bnt
no personal adherents. His natural supporters were
the old ad-visers of his father and the men whom'
Oliver had ga,thered around him out of nearly every
political and reUgious section of the nation. But

RICHARD, LOED PEOTECTOE, 388
over these Eichard had no personal hold but their
sense of the public and their own interest, and suc^
feeling of attachment as they might have for thp
memory of his father. He had lived, as we have
seen, with men of aU parties, and though he was
never a Cavalier in his feelings or opinions, some of
the -Cavaliers even had persuaded themselves that he
would hasten to restore the King, — so little had been
the impression left by him of his personal opinions.
With the army, even if he ever held more than a
nominal authority in their ranks, he had no special
ties and no individual infiuence. With the officers
the feeUng respecting him was divided between
jealousy of the other counciUors, and perhaps th^
older nobUity, whom Eichard might prefer to place
in the high posts of the Government, distrust of his
earnestness in their cause, and (in the case of his
uncles Desborough and Jones and his brother-in-lavy
Fleetwood) the unrespectful and invidious patronage
of relatives. The Eepublican party in the Army
and among the class of statesmen retained their
aversion to the office of Protector, while they lost
their fear of its possessor, and also the controlling
restraints of old associations, which had at times
half disarmed their antagonism and their anger in
the case of Olive™ The Presbyterians were willing
enough to adopt Eichard as a temporary head, but
they were desirous to clip his independent power,
untU they had seen whether they could not find a

884 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
more suitable head for a new dynasty. One man
only might have saved him, if he also had not been
disqualified by his antecedents and personal cha
racter. This was his younger brother, Henry.
Henry Cromwell was an able man, and an ad
mirable administrator, fuU of the spirit of his father's
wisest policy in many respects, and equal to any oc
casion on which his judgment made him resolve to
take effective action. He had agreeable manners
and a love of mixed society, though there was pro
bably no truth in the scandalous rumours which
reached England and his family, and which he seems
to have refuted by unexceptionable testimony to the
contrary. As far as the natural opponents of his
father's government were concerned, he took a wise
and large view of the situation ; and the effect of his
tolerant conciliation was very evident in the tran
quiUity and satisfaction of the Irish people under his
rule. But he was not equally tolerant of the alien
ated sections of the Puritan party and of disaffected
friends. He had no old associations such as those
of his father with the Eepublicans and ' Anabaptists,'
of the Army and the Parliament, and did not, like
him, 'understand the men,' and see the common
elements and sympathies which ^Ul might form a
bond of future union. He could only see in Vane ' a
rotten member of the Commonwealth,' in the Army
only a dangerous agent of arbitrary power, and in
the Sectaries only unreasonable and fanatic men.

EICHAED, LORD PROTECTOR. 885
He had no natural insight into character, and his
own prejudices and his anger at the personal attacks
on his father, to whose memory he was devoted, and
whose government he thought the ideal of the ' Good
Old Cause,' prevented him from avaUing himself of
his undoubted powers of observation and discernment.
He had exceUent sense and a sound judgment as to
the natural and probable issues of events, but his
ability was not sufficiently commanding, as a whole,
to overawe opposition and control the situation. He
could act himself, if in his judgment he seemed
called on to do so ; but he could not see clearly
enough into the condition of affairs at a distance to
be able to give more than general advice. He com
plained to his friends that he had bOen left quite
unacquainted with the inner workings of affairs in
England ; and he had not the resources of genius in
himself to make up for the deficiency. He was an
agreeable companion, but he had not the sweet
temper of Eichard, and his more strongly pronounced
opinions and actions often excited personal dislike.
But what was most disqualifying in Henry at this
crisis was the fact that he had no enterprise, and was
of a despondent spirit. Where he should have
animated his iner|jJ)rother to action by pointing out
the advantages he actually possessed, he could only
dweU sorrowfully on the dangers and difficulties, and
lament his own inabUity to assist him by advice or
personal co-operation. AU he could do was to
c c

886 ESTIMATES QF THE .ENGLISH .KINGS.
promise to maintain his own government in Ireland,
and write exceUent admonitory letters to his mis
chievously ' compliant ' brother-^in-law Fleetwood,
He had no self-confidence, and his very absence of
personal ambition and dislike of arbitrary measures
and bloodshed made him untrue to his adherents and
his own cause when the crisis came. He succumbed
tamely to the EepubUcans when his brother was de
posed ; and his conduct on the eve of the Eestoration,
if personally dignified, was deficient in duty to his
responsibilities as a trustee and centre of power for
the ' Good Old Cause.' In his fall, England lost a
wise and right-minded administrator, but hardly a
great statesman.
The serious and repeated Ulnesses of Thurloe, the
best informed of Oliver's old advisers, in the very
crisis of the situation, accelerated the downfaU of
Uichard. One moment's breathless calm and quiet
acquiescence in his government had followed his ac
cession ; but this was rather because his enemies of
all parties expected the Government to fall of itself
with the death of the Protector Oliver. But when
it remained erect and unassailed, there was a disposi
tion to exaggerate its strength, and to rejoice in its
xmexpected stability. That wo.Kj|d have been the
moment for the personal action of the new Protector.
But it was lost, and when he did act, it was not by
balancing contending parties, and so becoming the
master of the position ; but by resoiting to successive

EICHARD, LORD PROTECTOR. 887
and conflicting lines of policy, which roused all
parties against him, and disheartened and disarmed
his friends. He allowed the ParUament to curtail
his powers, to lower his authority, and then to
alienate and irritate to the utmost the Army and
the officers. He next dissolved the Parliament at
the dictation of the officers, and then, deserted by all
parties alike, was himself deposed without a struggle,
unless we call that a struggle which consisted in the
menace of his continued residence (notwithstanding
the orders of Parliament) in the royal palaces. He
fell, not because he did not see what ought to be done,
but because he acted too late, and at the wrong
moment. Had he interposed sooner with the Par
liament in behalf of the Army, the Army would have
afterwards supported him even against its own
officers, if the appeal had been made to them in the
name of their old General. Even at the last, had he
boldly resumed his authority on the quarrel of the
Army with the restored Long Parliament, and issued
writs for a new Parliament, pledging himself to the
officers to defend their just interests as weU as the
common public cause, they would have probably
acquiesced, and the nation would have welcomed and
supported him. But such was not to be the case
with ' idle Dick CromweU,' and he retired into private
life. Once again he reappears in our State Papers as
the wUling head of a conspiracy for his restoration,
during the angry state of public opinion caused by
c c 2

388 ESTIMATES OF. THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the humiliations of the Dutch war; but he dis
appointed even that doubtful opening of fortune by
his dilatory inaction ; and our last glimpse of him is
in Westminster Hall, as a suitor against his own
daughters. The suit was a just one, but it proved
most painfully that the kind-hearted old country
gentleman had no moral control over his own house
hold, and finally had forfeited the respect of his o-wn
children.

389

CHABLES THE SECOND.
Among all the EngUsh Sovereigns there is no
instance of a popular favourite to whose memory
such injustice has been done, intellectually, as it has
to the so-called ' Merry Monarch.' The popular
conception of Charles Stuart the Younger — and
among the general English public there is no king
of whom there is a more distinct conception — is of
an easy, good-natured, if not good-hearted volup
tuary — socially an accompUshed gentleman and wit,
but with neither the capacity nor the desire for
government or serious affairs, who managed to
saunter through a reign of a quarter of a century,
getting as much pleasure and irresponsibility as he
could for himself amidst the general scramble of un
principled men for power and place ; but without the
enterprise or perseverance necessary to any scheme
for establishing the autocracy of the Crown, and with
such a wholesome dread of 'going again on his
travels,' or renewing the fatal scene at the window
in Whitehall, as to afford a sure guarantee that he :
would retreat from any such attempt on the first

890 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
serious demonstration of popular resentment. As
might be expected, there is much in this conception
of Charles which belonged to his real character ; yet
as a representation of that character as a whole it is
defective and delusive.
Whatever may be our difficulty in ascertaining
what his real character was — and there are remark
able difficulties in his case — there can be no doubt
, of one pomt, and that is that Charles was by far the
ablest of the English Stuarts. This is not high
praise in itself, but we have unexceptionable evidence
that as an individual, as distinguished from a Euler,
there have been few men who have mounted the
throne of England who can bear comparison with
him in intellectual capabilities. Sir William Temple
— who whatever may be his disqualifications for
judging of the character of Charles as a whole, was
eminently qualified for forming a correct judgment
of him in this point of view — gives us the following
estimate, with which I may fitly introduce the sub
ject. Speaking of an interview which he had with
the King, he says: — 'I never saw him in better
humour, nor ever knew a more agreeable conversa
tion when he was so> and where he was pleased to
be famUiar; great quickness of conception, great
pleasantness of wit, with great variety of knowledge,
mPre observation, and truer judgment of men than
bne would have imagined by so careless and easy a
manner as was natural to him in all he did and said.

CHARiLES THE SECOND. 391
He desired nothing but that he might be easy him
self, and that everybody else should be so.' The last
sentence, which conveys an inference and speculation
on Temple's o-wn part, whether true or false, stands,
of course, on another basis of evidence from the
specific results of his own. observation, recorded in
the sentences which precede, and which are tolerably
conclusive as to the marked capacity of Charles in
matters of serious import.
The character of Charles, whatever it may have
been originaUy, appears to me to have been influenced
in its practical development by two somewhat con
flicting circumstances. He was the representative of
the principle of legitimacy, and he was an adventurer.
Bom in the; purple, he had scarcely time to realise
the notions of high prerogative and right divine
which were in the ascendant in the Court of Charles
the First, when at the age of twelve he was placed
in the nominal command of a guard raised by his
father, at the outbreak of a great struggle, in which
the validity of those royal pretensions was subjected
to the severe practical test of civil war; and from
that time his life for the next four years was the
wandering one of a soldier, varied only by the hollow
and, fleeting honours of a puppet-court. When even
a remote island of his father's dominions was no
longer a safe seat for this factitious royalty, he
became at the age of sixteen a refugee in a foreign
country; and for nearly fourteen years he led the

892 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
life of a needy adventurer and an almost hopeless
Pretender, scarcely relieved by the short and doubt
ful mterlude of his roving royalty as ' King of Scots.'
When at the age of thirty — mature in body and
mind — he at length acquired his long-deferred in
heritance, except so far as his personal pretensions
as a disinherited prince, and their occasional recog
nition by foreign rulers might have modified it, his
character had been essentially moulded in the type
of an adventurer. A certain amount of ability, or at
least of adroitness, presence of mind, and self-reliance
must necessarily be the result of such a school of
circumstances. The amount of enterprise engendered
may be a variable quantity, but the virtues of endur
ance, patience, and (in some form or other, and to
some extent) of self-control, are necessary products
of this discipline. Much, of course, must depend on
the quality of the original material thus affected, and
the natural temperament and intellectual capacity
of Charles must form a principal and determining
element in any analysis of his character; but (be
these what they might) he could never escape from
his recollections of half a generation as a struggling
adventurer. It might seem at first as if there could have been
little more in common between Charles and the
English world into which his ' Eestoration ' (as it
was called) really first introduced him, than a recog
nition of those hereditary pretensions which the

CHARLES THE SECOND. 393
country of his birth was at length proclaiming with
wild and vague enthusiasm. His own past life —
which must always have been to him the most
thoroughly realised portion of his life — lay quite
apart from that of England during the same period,
and it might seem that there could be little sym
pathy between the two. Yet the life of English
men at home had also been, during the preceding
twenty years, very much that of adventurers, full
of strange vicissitudes, new and untrodden ways,
and restless uncertainty and change. A desire for
repose, under almost any conditions, had for the time
succeeded the fever of their aspirations for the highest
types of national and individual life. They too wel
comed the restoration of the exiled Stuarts as an
epoch not of hope but of rest, in which they might
forget what they had been, in a dream of indolent
pleasure. What to Charles was the realisation of
his wildest hopes was with the nation really (not
withstanding the external delirium of joy) the re
signation of disappointed hope. The .adventures of
both People and Euler had ended, and they wel
comed each other, and exchanged greetings, with a
not entirely dissimUar retrospect, and with identical
wishes for the present, though their feelings were
really essentially different, and as such gave no secu
rity for harmony between them in the future. The
public mind in England had been nearly as much
affected and demoralised by the spirit of the past as

894 ESTIMATES OE THE ENGLISH KINGS.
had that of the adventurer whom they summoned; to
theiin aid, and', the history of the succeeding years is
as; much an exemplification of the effects of this
training on the character of the nation at large as of
Charles himself; and this.; fact rendered the complete
ness of his change of scene and associations more
apparent than real.
The ' Eestoration ' brought to Charles rest- — as: it
did momentarily to the nation — but the rest was not
similar in character. In the nation it was the torpor
of exhanstion, in the King it was the repose of a
more assured position. To caU Charles indolent, is
to mistake his disposition, or to place an unusual
meaning on the word. The love of pleasure and of
ease was, no doubt, a constituent and important
element of his nature. ' Pleasure and the undisturbed
pursuit of pleasure were certainly a great feature in
his purposes of life, but the enjoyment of life as a
whole was his real and leading disposition. - He did
not confine his attention to, or even take the most
keen interest in, what are called, par excellence, the
pleasures of life. He indulged in these to excess, but
he carried his spirit of enjoyment into departments
which are considered the most alien to pleasure as
such. His conception of the sphere of enjoyment,
indeed, covered the whole field of life. His mind was
much too active and powerful to rest satisfied with
the narrow province of the ordinary pleasure seeker.
The very scepticism which he had imbibed from, t3ie:

CHAELES THE SECOND. 395
school in which he had been brought up, as to the
reality of great principles, and of the recognised
axioms of human conduct, widened his field of
amusement. What was to earnest men a grave
matter of serious and business-like attention, became
in his eyes an amusing comedy of errors. The play
of human feelings, and the phantasmagoria of
politics, had a sensuous and irresistible charm for
him. He was not satisfied until he had fathomed the
character and natures of aU the leading actors in the
scenes passing around him, and then it was his
great pleasure to set the whole machine in motion,
and play a game of life according to his preconceived
ideas of the value and import of the various figure-
pieces. He looked at everything, not with reference
to what it was, but to what it might be made to
appear ; and at men not with regard to their charac
ters and principles, but to the significance of the
parts they had undertaken to play. To acquire this
minute knowledge of men and cu'cumstances, so as
to obtain a quiet mastery over them, at least in his
own mind, appeared, indeed, to him essential to the
preservation of his power of enjoying life according
to his wishes, and he made a new pleasure out of a
supposed necessity. Although careless in his manner,
a carelessness which expressed faithfully his estimate
of the importance of human Ufe and actions, but not
his interest and amusement in them, he had natu
rally an inquisitive as weU as an observant mind, and

396 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
though he affected to trifle with consequences, he was
not. the less anxious to pry into the secrets of nature.
His knowledge, though not contemptible, came from
observation rather than from study. So far as ob
servation and quickness of perception would carry
him, his mind was scientific in its tone. He liked to
attend anatomical dissections — it was said popularly
from anxiety about his own health, and no doubt he
was desirous it should be attributed to that cause
alone, in order to preserve his popular character of
indifference to wider considerations. But he also
engaged in chemical experiments, took great interest
in the scientific improvement of ai-tiUery, and directed
his attention beyond anything else to naval archi
tecture. The empirical and perceptive faculties
implied in scientific pursuits, as distinguished from
a priori truths and the elements of an intelligent
faith — Science, in fact, in its unreligious aspect —
were peculiarly congenial to his mind. He was an
earnest man, so far as one to whom principles and
men were alike unreal and conventional could be so.
But he had learned the lesson from the events of his
early life, that the secret of obtaining and retaining
real power lies in obtaining and preserving a charac
ter for careless indifference, in never parading the
possession of power before the public eye, and yet
always treating its absence as a provisional accident.
In this way he secured an amount of actual licence
for his own wUl which realised the wildest aims of

CHAELES THE SECOND. 897
his father. He tried, and usually with success, to
avoid any appearance of annoyance at unexpected
or successful opposition to his plans. He regarded
such contretemps as inevitable, and gave way for the
time as little as he could, but quite as much as was
needed. He received Lord Eussell and his colleagues
as his ministers without apparent distaste, and when
the time was ripe, and he had quietly made their
position untenable, blandly accepted their resig
nations 'with all his heart.' He never entirely
broke with any man of influence or ability untU he
felt that he could be turned to no further account,
and was only a dangerous nuisance. From the first
he was determined himself to govern, though this
should not be seen by the jpublic, a.nd only felt im
perfectly by his Ministers themselves. He had his
own ideas (though they never amounted to fixed
plans) as to the government and organisation of
England, just as he took pleasure and displayed
considerable skill in planting, gardening, and build
ing. But he kept his ideas in the former case to him
self, and never made a confidant of any one man or
woman. Nor did he ever commit himself definitely
and unreservedly to any one line of policy, or place
himself in the hands entirely of any one minister. He
resembled his father in entertaining several plans at
the same time, but he had the diplomatic talent, in
which his father was entirely wanting, of making
their very discrepancies and antagonisms subservient

898 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
to his general purpose. He had usuaUy two or three
plans of policy in seeming suspense, and two or three
ministers each rejoicing in a very limited, but, as he
supposed, undivided confidence. Most of the men of
his time, no doubt he regarded with amused con
tempt. He had gauged the exact amount of the talents,
and he had a clear knowledge and appreciation of
ihe special characters and prejudices of a Shaftesbury,
an Arlington, a Danby, a Halifax, and a EusseU, and
he made use of them aU in turn, and from the conflict
or balance of their characters and prejudices managed
to avoid the dictation of any of them, while it became
quite impossible to gather his real mind from the
composition of any of his administrations. His own
policy was always ambiguous, and the public leapt to
the conclusion, that he was a careless indifferentist
who had no policy at aU. He carried this ambiguity
even into the province of his personal debaucheries.
If he had a mistress with French or Eoman CathoUc
proclivities to raise the hopes of one faction, he had
also a Protestant mistress at the same time to re
assure the fears of others. The story is well known
of NeUGwynne's coarse but effective explanation when
she was assailed by a Protestant mob in mistake for
the Duchess of Portsmouth. Charles never ignored or
directly opposed national prejudices when they as
sumed formidable dimensions, but he never succumbed
to them. He temporised, made concessions, evaded
decided issues, and waited and watched till, by skU-

CHAELES THE SECOND. 899
fuUy avaUing himself of the course of events, he
seemed to have been released by them rather than to
have released himself from his engagements. Popular
suspicion of any designs of his own was effectuaUy
disarmed by his seemingly idle habits and his cheer
ful affabUity. Who could have suspected a Eoyal
conspirator in the chatty man of pleasure feeding
the dupks in St. James's Park! Nature had at
tempted to mark the true character of the man by
the grim sardonic features with which she had
endowed him; but he persuaded his people to
disbeUeve in the evidence of nature. But if he
deluded his own people, he deluded foreign powers
also. He was, it is weU known, the pensioner of
France ; but it is an entire mistake to suppose that
he was the mere servile tool of Louis. He had made
up his mind that it was quite impossible to lead the
independent life he required, and escape the surveil
lance and interference of Parliament, if he was to be
dependent for his revenue on it alone. He was too
shrewd to resort to the systematic iUegalities of his
father to obtain extra-Parliamentary supplies ; and
he resolved to achieve his end out of the coffers of
Louis. He cared little for the degradation to himself
of such a position in the eyes of France, or of his own
people, when it was accidentally disclosed to them.
He was resolved not to be whoUy dependent on Louis
any more than on the House of Commons, and he
played off the one resource against the other with

400 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
marvellous skill and success. Louis, in fact, could
scarcely count more surely on Charles's support, as
the reward of his money-payments, than he could on
that of the popular leaders whom he also paid for
opposing their King. King and patriots alike took
his money, and acted very much as they would have
done if they had had other resources. Charles had
no desire to commit himself either to a Catholic or
Protestant alliance, and though the occasions of his
changes of policy might be to some extent affected
by the money of Louis, on the whole, except in the
political humiliation of England, Louis was decidedly
the loser, and the dupe in these pecuniary trans
actions ; and Charles himself preserved substantially
a position of independence. He had nearly always
the alternative to offer of a popular and anti-French
policy, which would secure him willing supplies from
Parliament, or of abstinence from such a course at
the price of French gold ; and Louis had generally
no alternative but to open his coffers.
The conventional aspect in which most questions
presented themselves to the mind of Charles had at
least one good effect. They rendered him compara
tively unsusceptible to the feelings of resentment and
iuiplacability. NaturaUy good-tempered, and in his
familiar social intercourse willing to bear defeat in
his encounters of wit with good-humour, he did not,
as a rule, feel any personal grudge to those who
thwarted or opposed his political schemes. He was

UHARLliS THE SECOND. 401
cold-hearted enough, it is true, to pronounce their
doom with calm indifference, if policy seemed to
render their removal desirable ; but apart from this,
he avoided the shedding of blood, and would seldom
condescend to remember personal injuries. The men
who had condemned his father to the scaffold he sent
to a cruel death with entire phlegm, though in so
doing he probably followed a policy of Eoyal self-
assertion, and consulted the demands of excited
partisans, rather than those of his own feelings. He
did not press the sentence on Lambert, while he
pronounced the greatest possible panegyric on the
abUities and character of Vane, in declaring him to
be, in his opinion, too dangerous a man to let live.
Eussell and Sidney suffered probably less from any
fear of their personal ability than from a strong, belief
in their influence as the heads of a party which, but
for their removal, might have succeeded after the
King's death in preventing the succession of the Duke
of York. On this latter point Charles had followed
his usual policy of balancing pretensions and keeping
his real purpose in suspense. He had indulged his
own fondness for Monmouth freely, and in so doing
had held in check the intrigues of James, and the
uncompromising party who gathered round that
Prince ; while at the same time he never allowed
Monmouth to assume the position of his intended
heir, or to become anything else than a useful link
between the Crown in his own person and the
D D

402 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
popular aspirations which associated themselves with
the name of his son. As a fact, Charles probably
had a strong feeUng as to the abstract rights of his
brother, although he did not choose to commit him
self quite irretrievably in public to this doctrine. He
had, however, a settled opinion, that any alteration
in the succession, if made at all, should proceed from
his own will, and not from the demands and imagined,
necessities of the nation. In subsequent years Halifax
and Sheffield (afterwards Duke of Buckingham),
who both knew him well, asserted that Charles was
himself an Atheist. It is tolerably certain, however,
now that he became a member of the Eoman Catholic
Church before the Eestoration. The truth probably
is, that Charles had a belief in the existence of a God,
but of such a God as he himself would conceive
as the highest type of absolute Sovereignty — per
fectly irresponsible — watching in serene seclusion the
course of human affairs, and employing as the exter
nal agents of his religious administration a Church
of conventional forms and conventional doctrines.
When he had once recognised this agent of the Divine,
he did not think it necessary to identify himself more
closely with it untU he received its certificate of sal
vation on his death-bed, satisfied till then with assist
ing it when convenient to him, and making use of it
much as he would of any other human machinery.
When he had received this necessary passport to the
next world his sense of duty was satisfied, and he

CHAElkb THE SECOND. 403
apologised politely to the expectant courtiers for
being so long in dying.
As far, however, as the practical affairs of life and
of his own Government were concerned, Charles was
an Atheist. He believed in nothing and in nobody
except in himself, and in his own power of managing
his own business. Having no faith, he had no real
object, except the passive one of securing his own
freedom of action or inaction, and carrying On the
Government of England as pleasantly and with as
little turmoU as possible. In this sense there is
great truth in Temple's remark, which has been
already quoted, that ' he desired nothing but that he
might be easy himself, and that everybody else should
be so.' It is impossible to conceive of a greater
contrast than that offered between his Government
in this respect and that of the Protector Oliver. If
ever there was an attempt made to realise the presence
and government of God in the administration of this
country, it was made, and to some extent successfully
made, by the great Protector. But able and sagacious
and clear-sighted as Charles was, he may be truly
said to have ' lived without God,' and the un-Godlike
in the fuU sense of the term became the distinguishing
stamp of his reign. At the best, his administration
was a successful subterfuge, a clever imposture, an
adroit pis-aller. He had a profourid faith in his own
traditional position as Sovereign, and he had an
intense pride in his own personality as the arbiter of
D d2

404 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the situation. Yet his plan of Government rendered
it necessary that he himself should skulk behind a
screen of falsehood and chicanery, and that his
personality should be merged in a puppet-show. He
wished well to England, yet he degraded her in the
eyes of every nation of Europe, and set a stamp of
ignominy on his foreign administration in the eyes
of nearly every Englishman, Not a few important
and valuable laws are connected with his reign, yet
not one is in popular memory connected with his name
and fame. We know from the personal character of
his administration that he must have passively or
wUlingly sanctioned their enactment, but he has suc
ceeded by his system of dissimulation in prevent
ing us from assigning with certainty any personal
merits to him for any one of them. He affected to
favour contradictory policies of many men in suc
cession, so that his own position lost all distinctness ;
and if he escaped from the general discredit, he
forfeited all claim to particular merits. He had
clever ideas on public affairs, and a thorough insight
into the lower motives, at least, of human action.
He meant probably to pursue some policy of his own,
but he ended as he began, with merely evading
complicity in the policy of others. He had the ability
to have set his stamp upon the age : he only suc
ceeded in obliterating himself.

405

JAMES THE SECOND.
It has been the misfortune of Eoman Catholicism in
England, that the only two Sovereigns since the
Eeformation who have openly identified themselves
with its cause have been both singularly ill-qualified
to inspire enthusiasm by their personal characteristics.
Queen Mary, whatever may be her claims to respect
in certain points of view, was unquestionably most
unattractive in her demeanour; and James Stuart
the Younger was personaUy as unromantic -and un
interesting a martyr as any cause has ever boasted.
In his brother Charles, unshackled personal govern
ment had appealed to the support and half-disarmed
the prejudice of the nation by an almost unparalleled
combination of geniality and consummate tact ; but
in the case of James, even those most disposed to
enlist themselves under the banner which he dis
played, found their continued adherence to him a
rather severe strain on their feelings of devoted loy
alty. And even now it is difficult to peruse the re
cords of his unfortunate career -without experiencing
a much stronger feeling of distaste, not to say repug-

406 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
nance, than is warranted by the actual offences and
real disposition of James himself Certainly in him
error and vice lost all the grace which sometimes is
held to be their paUiation, if not their condonation ;
and his reputation remains stripped of aU adventitious
appeals for sympathy, except such as may spring
from the merciful consideration and pity due to one
who ended his days in exile and comparative obscurity.
Any description of the character of such a man, apart
from a nairative of events, cannot be very interest
ing ; for any interest belonging to the period attaches
itself to the events themselves, not to the man who
was in turn their principal agent and their victim.
James Stuart affords in his career a remarkable
example of a man of limited capacity and shaUow
moral nature, tempted by the mistaken estimate
formed of him by others, as well as by his own un-
doubting self-esteem, to attempt the roles of a
statesman and an apostle. There was by nature just
enough ability in him to have made him a respectable
man of business, if circumstances had not caUed him
to any important career ; and he had just enough
good principles to have made him a fairly conscien
tious and generally weU-meaning, if not highly moral
individual, if circumstances had not exposed him to
any great temptations. He had a clear head for
small things, with good sense in their appreciation, and
when he chose had considerable powers of application
to business. He was by nature obstinate, but rather

JAMES THE SECOND. 407
from slowness, in apprehending anything which was
alien to his preconceived ideas than from any actual
persistency in his nature ; for he was also very im
pressionable when some chord of his nature was
touched, or when the argument was brought within
the range of his mental perceptions ; and when thus
affected, he was apt to take sudden resolutions in
entirely opposite directions to his former line of
action. He was really much influenced and led by
those who could lay hold of his characteristic pe
culiarities, but he never wUUngly did anything which
he did not believe to have proceeded from himself
alone, and to have been dictated by his own un
assisted judgment. He had the greatest desire to
master the situation, and the most firm belief that
he was capable of so doing. The Duke of Bucking
ham, according to Bishop Burnet, said of the two
Eoyal brothers, that Charles II. ' could see things if
he would,' and James ' would see things if he could.'
He was a man who was injured moraUy and intel
lectually almost equally by prosperity and adversity.
By the former his ambition was raised, hi« estimate
of his own abiUties was enormously exaggerated, his
confidence of success became unbounded ; good sense
and prudence alike deserted him, his temper became
rough and arrogant, his disposition fierce and un
feeling, and his whole nature was hardened. On the
other hand, adversity or an unexpected overthrow of
. his confident anticipations depressed his inteUect

408 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
below its natural standard, crushed his personal
dignity, and injuriously affected his moral integrity.
And his whole career had been one of extreme
vicissitudes of good and ill fortune. When too
young to be much infiuenced in the formation of his
character by external events, he had been exposed,
Uke his elder brother, to the perUs and calamities
of civU war, — had been a sort of State prisoner
in the hands of the victorious ParUament, — had
escaped to the Continent whUe stUl a lad, and had
there been subjected alike to the e-vils of exile, and
the allurements or persecutions of his mother's
religious proselytism. The obstinate elements of his
nature seem to have been roused by these attempts
to force him, against his own free-wUl, into the fold
of Eome, and he resisted aU overt attempts with a
seeming pertinacity of Protestant conviction. He
served both under Turenne and Conde with some
distinction, giving evidence of aptitudes for the
duties of an officer, which induced Turenne, it is said,
to entertain expectations of his military capacity
which were never in any way realised in succeeding
years. This was one of the first instances of his
reaUy limited abiUties misleading spectators into the
idea that he was designed for great things. In fact,
his brother's fate was exactly reversed in his case.
Charles was a clever man, who was depreciated
through his own wUful self-effacement. James was
a man of inferior talents, who was overrated, and

JAMES THE SECOND. 409
who endeavoured to make the world believe that this
exaggerated estimate was correct. In the early
years of his brother's reign he was looked upon with
considerable respect as the appropriate head of the
MUitia of the Crown, both by land and sea. His
political influence was weakened, but not overthrown,
by the downfaU of his father-in-law, Clarendon. He
had a sort of professional pleasure in the two ser
vices, especiaUy in the Na-vy, as to which he liked to
fancy himself a great administrative reformer. This,
joined to a display of physical courage which passed
for that presence of mind in crises in which he was
really deflcient, made the nation for a short time
believe that they had found in him a hero-prince and
a great commander. At the same time, an impetu
ous outspokenness, which, in truth, was the result
very much of arrogance, inspired a belief in his blunt
sincerity and truthfulness. But scarcely had he
recommended himself to the national affections by
these specious appearances of great qualities, and
secured the hearty thanks and eager reward of
Parliament for his services, than he began to degene
rate under the effects of good-fortune and popular
estimation, and to display less pleasing character
istics, which soon affected vitaUy the public estimate
of him on nearly all points. Pepys, his subordinate
in the Admiralty and devoted creature, has recorded
the gossip which conveyed the first intimation of
this change in the public appreciation of the Duke

410 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
in consequence of the change in his demeanour from
obsequiousness to arrogant self-assumption.
By degrees the nation awoke to the conviction
that James entertained extremely dangerous ideas
on the subject of arbitrary power in the Executive,
and was very ready to anticipate in his own personal
actions their general recognition. James, in fact,
had really had no experience of his own capacity for
dealing -with great events. A Eevolution had driven
him helplessly into exUe ; another Eevolution, which
he had had no part in bruigiog about, had replaced
him in his native country, and in a position of dig
nity. A popular delusion had credited him with
eminent abUities, in one department at least, and
had conjectured the existence of corresponding talent
in other directions. He accepted aU these things as
true measures of his capacity, and of the inherent
power of the Cro-wn, and in the fulness of his self-
satisfaction he unfolded to the nation something of
his real nature. Like his father, but uiUike his
brother Charles, his pleasm-e was in the display more
than in the reality of power, and he reaped the fruit
in a corresponding amount of unpopularity.
But the event which overthrew entirely the estima
tion in which he once stood with the English nation
was his avowal of his conversion to Eoman Catholi
cism. His brother Charles seems to have been already
a Eoman Catholic when he landed in England at
the Eestoration ; but we have no evidence of James

JAMES THE SECOND. 411
having adopted these -views so early. He had been
a much more ardent Protestant whUe an exUe than
his brother ever was during his whole lifetime ; but
in some way or other the astute Church of Eome had
obtained the key to his understanding and feelings
on this point, and the obstinate Protestant became
the obstinate Eomanist. There was something, in
deed, in the pretensions of Eome which was congenial
to the character of James. Although he was jealous
of his own independence of action, he was, as I have
said, really much disposed to rely on others, through
an unconscious recognition of his own inferior capacity.
It ^as, therefore, a real relief to his whole nature
when he was induced to believe that in one great
department of thought he was not required by any
regard to self-respect to exert his own judgment;
and when, as a necessity of human nature in general,
he was called on to rely implicitly on the guidance of
an Infallible Church. As early as the February of
1661, Pepys expresses his disinclination that ' the
Duke of York and his famUy should come to the
throne, he being a professed friend to the Catholiques.'
But for many years, and long after the time when it
is known that he was a member of the Eoman
Church, James attended the ordinances of the Church
of England and remained an ostensible Protestant.
In January, 1669, the meeting took place at his
house in which King Charles avowed himself a
Eoman Catholic, and professed a wish to estabUsh

412 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
that religion in England. But it was not till 1672
that James omitted to take the Easter Sunda.y com
munion with the Anglican Church ; he repeated this
omission in 1678; and on the passing of the Test
Act in the latter year, he resigned his public em
ployments and avowed his religious opinions. The
long delay in this disclosure of his conversion was
probably due to the influence of Charles, who was
greatly annoyed at his brother's ultimate avowal,
which seriously compromised his own position, and
overthrew any schemes of his own for a gradual
preparation of the ground for a safe declaration of
opinion on the part of both of them. But James,
probably, entirely misapprehended the strength and
significance of the popular sentiment on this point,
and believed that a public avowal of their conversion
by the members of the Eoyal Family would itself
prepare the minds of the nation for a coming change
in their own Established Eeligion. From this time,
during the rest of the reign of his brother, he was
a constant object of popular suspicion. His ability
as well as his disposition for evil were exaggerated,
and no efforts on his part to conciliate public opinion
would have succeeded in disarming the prejudice
against him. His own attempts to regain his former
position were very unsuccessful. He never succeeded
in persuading the Nonconformists that he was a
lover of toleration, by his new-born sympathy with
their disabUities and persecutions, and his overtures

JAMES THE SECOND. 413
to the popular leaders in Parliament to co-operate
with them against Danby, which in his autobio
graphical memorials he falsely represents as over
tures to him on their part, indignantly rejected by
him, were, in fact, coldly received, and led to no
results. The adroit firmness of Charles rescued his brother
from the impending blow of the Exclusion Bill ; and
once more, without any merit of his own, he resumed
some degree of open authority in public affairs, and
succeeded without opposition to the long-coveted
Crown, which had at one time seemed hopelessly lost
to him. I need not here repeat the well-known tale
of his subsequent blunders. At the moment of his
accession, and while stiU distrustfvd of the reality of
his recognition by the nation, he promised every
thing in Church and State that the nation could
desire, and showed a mild urbanity of manner which
astonished and delighted his well-wishers among the
Protestant Tories and High Churchmen. But as
soon as he found himself popular, James relapsed
into his arrogance and self-assumption, explained
away his promises, and soon showed that in the
intoxication of a momentary success he believed
everything feasible that he himself wished, and the
nation most detested. Minister succeeded minister
in his counsels ; measure succeeded measure in a
rapid progression of arbitrary tendencies, and Anti-
Protestant proceedings, untU every man of influence

414 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
was alienated, and every moderate partisan was driven
into open opposition. The unsuccessful risings of
Monmouth and ArgyU reaUy accelerated the downfall
of James, by increasing enormously his blind self-con
fidence. At last, a more formidable leader appeared
for the nearly universal discontent in England and
Scotland, in which latter country Nonconformity
had learnt by bitter experience the justice of its
former distrust of James's professions of toleration.
English Nonconformity had been very imperfectly
concUiated by the dangerous ' Indulgence,' under
which lurked designs of a very different nature.
Then James struck his last and, as it proved to him,
his fatal blow at the Church of England, in the
persons of some of her most influential prelates, and
even of some of the most devoted of the advocates of
the right divine of kings. On this came the expe
dition of WUliam of Orange, and the sudden panic-
stricken retractation by James of his madly rash
measures. It was too late; and after a faint and
ignominious struggle he left the shores of England
to return thither no more ; and after severe but de
cisive struggles in Scotland and Ireland, the legiti
mate line of the Stuarts ceased to reign over the
Three Kingdoms.
To his downfaU one of James's chUdren had con
tributed through the person of her husband, whUe
another had deserted him in the moment of his ut
most need. The rationale of their conduct belongs

JAMES THE SECOND. 415
rather to subsequent papers in this series of Esti
mates. It is sufficient to say here that James was
a fond father to his children when they were young,
and that he always retained a certain sense of
property in them, which approached, if it did not
realise, the intensity of natural affection, though it
did not prevent him from acting towards them on
occasions in a manner which was somewhat incon
sistent with that idea. As is weU known, he was an
uxorious but most unfaithful husband, his attach
ments to other women, which were very numerous,
seeming to be, except perhaps in the case of Cathe
rine Sedley, of a purely physical character. His
choice of mistresses, however, seemed to be in general
singularly independent of the common ideas of at
traction, so that his witty brother used to conjecture
that his ugly mistresses had been forced on him by
his priests as a penance. But, in fact, his priests
tried in vain to cheek this profligacy in their Eoyal
convert. James was a devout Eomanist, but an ob
stinate sinner, and with many promises and occa
sional penitence and remorse, he always relapsed into
his e-vU ways. His sense of duty was in this ease in
deed feebler than in other ordinary matters. Every
one must admit that he had a far stronger sense of
duty in general than his brother Charles, who can
scarcely be said to have had any idea of duty, as
such, at all. It was this which made James resolve
on an open avowal of his religious principles; and

416 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
this again, no doubt, was a great inciting cause of
his unlucky attempt to establish Eomanism on the
ruins of Protestantism after he became King. This
feeling of duty and perception of the difference
between right and wrong did not, it is true, prevent
James from being occasionally a liar and a dis
sembler, — but in the main it lent to his character a
certain weight which is its redeeming quality. If
he was a duU bigot, he was certainly not a merely
frivolous voluptuary. He had a purpose, and he
endeavoured to carry it out with unfaltering perti
nacity up to the fatal moment which disclosed to
him the dangers of his position, and to the world his
own want of presence of mind and of moral courage.
His pursuit of a definite purpose gave him, as con
temporaries have observed, the only intellectual
advantage which he possessed over his able brother
Charles. It is an unfortunate circumstance that it
was also the main cause of his disastrous downfaU.
The reputation of James would have been highest
if he had been confined to the seclusion of private
life ; it would have been fairly good if he had been
a permanent under-Secretary in a public office ; it was
very indifferent as a Statesman ; it is calamitously
evil as a Sovereign.

417

WILLIAM AND MABY.
The general intellectual ability of WilUam of Nassau,
Prince of Orange, has never been questioned, nor the
great influence which he exercised over the course of
European as well as English affairs from the time
when he flrst entered on the public arena. But a
considerable difference of opinion exists as to the
rank which should be assigned to him as an English
Sovereign, not merely morally, but also intellectually.
He was undoubtedly the originator and, during his
lifetime, the very soul of that European combination
which first checked Louis the Fourteenth in his pro
gress towards an autocracy over Europe, and which,
after William's own death, through the instrumen
tality of higher mUitary ability than he possessed,
completely destroyed the ascendancy of France. It
is to his enterprise and firm judgment, far more than
to any courage or capacity in Englishmen themselves,
that we are indebted for the speedy and comparatively
bloodless overthrow of all James Stuart's long-
cherished and matured schemes for the destruction
of the liberties of England. Yet, on the other hand,
E E

418 ESTEVUTES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
there is scarcely a reign in our annals which is less
satisfactory or agreeable than that of WiUiam the
Thu-d as an Ulustration of the relations between a
king and his people, or a king who achieved less
personal popularity than he did. The explanation of
this seeming anomaly appears to lie partly in the
peculiarities of his own character, and partly in the
exceptional circumstances of his position.
In William the Third the wise discretion of his
great-grandfather WUUam 'the SUent,' the heroic
leader of the Low Countries in their revolt against
the oppression of Spain, appeared to be revived, but
in a somewhat different and less favourable form. His
early years had unfortunately been attended by cir
cumstances which stiffened a naturally proud and
reserved disposition into repelling coldness and brood
ing uncommunicativeness. His physical constitution,
which is said to have been singularly poor-blooded, had
no doubt something to do with this demeanour. But
there was also a nervous irritability — usually display
ing itself in a morose and suUen demeanour, or a
rough and inconsiderate mode of expression, but some
times surging up into violent explosions of passion —
and there were an ardour and intemperance in his few
but deep personal attachments, which show that the
frozen surface of his nature was not incompatible
with the existence underneath of the boiling springs
of a deeply sensitive and passionate spirit. That the
rough and seemingly unfeeling manner to which he

WILLIAM AND MAEY. 419
sometimes gave way, was not an index of a real want
of warm feeling, or of his actual sentiments towards
those to whom it was displayed, is evident from the
fact that his wife, to whom he was devotedly attached,
and whose death nearly brought his own along with
it, and for the time actually unhinged his mind, was
yet the not unfrequent sufferer from these ebullitions.
There can be Uttle doubt, therefore, that these out
breaks were chiefly indications of physical disorder,
and not necessarUy connected with the essentials of
¦ his disposition. There was often in his bearing much
of the frigid and forbidding haughtiness of his grand
father Charles the First, on occasions when his wishes
were crossed and his prejudices and tastes offended ;
but just as he was much more honest than that King,
so he could not, like him, assume, when it served his
purpose and when his temper was under control, the
wiiming yet stately condescension which has given
a false varnish to Charles's manners as weU as to
his character in the eyes of posterity. At the same
time, without the somewhat selflsh ambition of his
great-uncle Maurice, WiUiam the Third had much
of Maurice's impatient sense of ability and desire of
untrammelled command. With many of the quali
fications of a military commander, he possessed also,
what has been frequently found the great disqualifi
cation of military men for civil government, an im
patience of the interference of private or popular
feelings and interests with the execution of a care-
XE 2

420 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
fully prepared and weU-considered policy, and an in
ability to understand the motives and right of such
interference, or to place themselves en rapport with
such opponents. Like them he was too much dis
posed in his own heart to resent the expression of
public opinion as a breach of discipline, and to view
all men as if they had all subscribed the articles of
Martial Law. With nothing of the self-centred
ambition and heartlessness of the House of Stuart,
WilUam had in no slight degree that sense of a
princely birth and its absolute rights which was so
prominent a feature in both Stuarts and Tudors, and
was the parent of the characteristic self-will of both
families. William the Silent had loved civil freedom
and constitutional forms of government in themselves,
and was ever eager to preserve and assert them, even
against his own family interests. But his great-
grandson had seen civil virtues chiefly in the form of
antagonism to himself, and an attempt to degrade
him from his rightfiil position, and deprive him of
his natural career in life ; while, in the forms of con
stitutional government, he had been compelled, by
the unhappy condition of his country, to recognise
only hindrances in his plans for saving her from a
foreign enemy and virtual auxiliaries to her national
enslavement. There was another circumstance which
disqualified the younger William from estimating
constitutional matters in their true light. The first
deliverer of the Dutch Provinces had had ample time

WILLIAM AND MAEY. 421
and opportunity, before he assumed the conduct of
public affairs, to cultivate his mind carefuUy, and to
gather up the lessons of ancient and modern history,
in aid of a proper interpretation of men and institu
tions. But the second deliverer of the Provinces had
but an imperfect and narrow education, and was left
very much to gather his political philosophy from his
own personal experiences. Such a training, while it
may cultivate a greater self-reliance and self-possessed
readiness, confines the materials of judgment to the
narrow limits of personal circumstances, and tends
to the identification of special and exceptional deve
lopments of political ideas with their necessary and
essential characteristics. William must have always
found it difficult to think of a watchful guardian of
constitutional privUeges without mixiag him up with
the memories of De Witt and the Anti-Orange party,
or to estimate the motives of an economical obstruc
tion to his plans for resisting the Dictator of Europe,
without some tacit imputation of insane or treache
rous indifference to national honour and safety.
And if this very limited and purely experimental
education deferred and modified the general popu
larity which he ultimately achieved in the Dutch
Confederation, stUl more would it operate disadvan
tageously in the case of England. It must be re
membered that, from his first years of intelligence
down to his expedition to England at the end of the
year 1688, William had known that country only as

422 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
the England of Charles the Second and James the
Second, and had based his estimate of Englishmen
and English politics on the peculiar circumstances of
that one period. Deeply interested, as from his near
relation to the English Throne, as weU as the weight
attaching to the national power of England in the
great European struggle, he necessarily was in all that
went on on that side of the water, he was shut out
by circumstances from any but the briefest and most
imperfect opportunities of making himself acquainted
with the rationale of English affairs and of EngUsh
men by personal observation. He had to rely for his
information on diplomatic reports from the Dutch
agents, or on the interested representations of Eng
lish political exiles. Nor, as far as I can judge, had
he any marked natural insight into character to en
able him to dispense with a prolonged personal
observation. If he never gave his unreserved confi
dence to persons unworthy of trust, the gap between
this inner circle and the outer one of his general ac
quaintances was so great as to warrant the suspicion
that he distrusted his own powers of insight too
much to venture beyond the weU assured ground of
a long-testing experience. He was only too much
justified by later events in his general distrust of
English statesmen ; but it was an unfortunate feeling
to be entertained by a King of England, and as its
result created a popular impression that, whatever

WILLIAM AND MAEY. 428
might be outward appearances, England, under him,
was really governed by foreigners only.
WiUiam in his heart must have looked upon Eng
lishmen generally as men not without strong opinions
and prejudices, but too unprincipled and too change
able to be reliable agents in any great enterprise
except when controlled within the strong grasp of a
high-principled autocrat. On the Whigs, as allies
in his European policy, he had but a very limited
reliance ; with the Whigs as professed patriots and
constitutionalists he had no sympathies at aU.
And such a type of character as that which he
associated with Englishmen, was really repulsive to
WiUiam. Though the school of diplomacy in which
he had been trained had exercised a certain unfavour
able influence on his own veracity and the spotlessness
of his honour, yet he was substantiaUy, and, for these
days, distinctively an honest and honourable man,
with whom honour and high principle were the most
congenial policy. Not only Louis the Fourteenth,
but his uncle, Charles the Second, tried in vain to
tempt him from the perilous and, it seemed then,
desperate path of honour in the defence of the
United Provinces, by offers of safe though dishonour
able authority and wealth. Burnet and the diploma
tic correspondence quoted by Sir James Mackintosh
in his ' History of the Eevolution ' inform us that
Charles seized the occasion of his nephew's visit to
England in October, 1670, when he was still a mere

424 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGBISH KINGS.
lad, though already a recognised statesman, to sound
him as to participation in his own infamous policy.
' AU the Protestants,' said the King, ' are a factious
body broken among themselves since they have
been broken from the main stock. Look into these
things better ; do not be misled by your Dutch block
heads.' The advice was not taken, and Charles, in
recording his failure to the French Ambassador, said,
' I am satisfied with the Prince's abilities, but I find
him too zealous a Dutchman and a Protestant to be
trusted with the secret.' In fact, it was this Protes
tantism of William's in its Calvinistic form which
braced up his moral integrity on this and simUar
occasions, and nerved him to that undaunted perse
verance which ultimately proved more than a match
for the craft and resources of Louis and the genius of
his marshals and statesmen. The Calvinistic system
of theology, although, as in William's own case, it
has not always proved a security against private
immorality in its professors, has always been the
guardian of public honour and national morality.
The Dutch House of Orange were deeply imbued
with this system, in the form in which it is held by
thoughtfal and strong men, and it was as an embodi
ment of its spirit, quite as much as through his indi-
"vidual self-reliance and natural abilities, that WiUiam
the Third was enabled to conduct so long and so unde-
spairingly, his very chequered contest with the power
of France. So when he was himself the subject of

WILLIAM AND MARY. 425
popular misrepresentation in England, his strong
religious feeling made him write to his beloved
Bentinck : ' I see in aU this only a chastisement of
Heaven, which blinds honest men, and permits the
wicked to prosper in their designs.' There was
much in this Calvinistic tone of religious thought
which might under other circumstances have formed
a strong bond between WUliam and the people he
was destined ultimately to govern. But the Calvinism
of the Prince was cast in such a mould as belonged
to a statesman and a man of European experience ;
whUe the Calvinism of England, which, in the person
of the Protector Oliver, had presented an ideal, how
ever imperfect, of a Christian governor, had degene
rated, through the deteriorating influences of succeed
ing years, into- a rabid antipathy to Eomanism and
a narrow Church creed. The Calvinistic WiUiam
had not missed the lessons of Toleration which a
European platform of action had impressed on his
great namesake WiUiam the Silent, while Calvinistic
England was much more busied in finding out in
quisitorial tests and political disqualifications for
avowed or concealed 'Papists and Socinians,' than
in applying to the larger questions of the day the
manly principles of public action and private self-
respect which may be deduced from that emphati-
caUy personal religious system with which the name
of Calvin has been associated. Thus, with simUar
religious dogmas, king and people had no common

426 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
reUgious field of action, and that which might have
cemented their union, and covered a host of incon
gruities on other points, became practically only a
source of discord. With an irreproachable orthodox
system of divinity, WilUam became in the eyes of the
EngUsh zealots in practice little better than a Lati-
tudinarian. The point as to the sincerity and truthfulness of
WUUam's character is undoubtedly not one which
can be settled quite satisfactorUy, or without some
reserve. His conduct during the reigns of his uncles
Charles and James has been subjected to severe
criticism, and he has been accused of playing a
selfishly ambitious and double part. Without going
so far as to acquit him of all underhand intrigue and
dissimulation, I may say that, considering the ex
traordinary difficulties of his position as son-in-law
to the heir to the Crown, and yet by his religious
sympathies, if not by his political position, himself
bound up with a cause to which his father-in-law had
generally shown marked hostUity, it teUs in favour
of the general truthfulness and honour of his charac
ter that, with the loose views then and stiU held
respecting the moral canons of diplomacy, there
should be so little evidence against him of positive
falsehood. M. Grimblot, the editor of the ' Corre
spondence of WiUiam the Third and Louis the
Fourteenth with their Ministers (1697 to 1700),'
after contrasting the style of WUliam's letters with

WILLIAM AND MARY. 427
that of his great rival's, observes : ' But if we pass
from the style to the kernel of the thought, the
superiority ceases to be on the side of Louis the
Fourteenth. In all their ruggedness the letters of
William the Third have a stamp of honesty which we
might seek for in vain in the grander despatches of his
rival. It is the same with the proceedings of both.'
During the reign of Charles the Second it was the
difficult part of WiUiam to endeavour to detach that
king from a French alliance, by exhibiting himself
in the most friendly light towards Charles personally,
and yet at the same time not to alienate the Whig
party in England, who on religious and political
grounds were his natural allies. He had to humour
the King's affection for the Duke of Monmouth by
sedulous attentions to that prince in exUe, and yet
not to strengthen Monmouth's pretensions to the
succession to the Crown, to the detriment of his own
wife's right and prospects. He had, at the beginning
of the succeeding reign, the still more difficult task of
guarding against the ruin of the party which sup
ported Monmouth's pretensions, and which formed
an important and active element in the Protestant
forces of England without aiding the Duke in the
subversion of the throne of James. To have assisted
Monmouth to his ends would have been suicidal on
WUUam's part, particularly at a time when WUliam's
own wife stood in the position of heiress to the
Crown. The manner in which WiUiam endeavoured

428 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
to meet this dilemma seems to have been as follows.
He complied at once with James' requests for the
return of the Scotch and English regiments which
were in the Dutch service, and he accompanied this
compliance with a private offer through Bentinck, to
come over himself and take a command in England
against the Duke. Had he done so, he could by his
influence have defeated the Duke's projects, and by
the moral and material position he would thus acquire
would have compeUed the King to come to such
terms with his subjects as might secure their liberties,
and, without degrading the Crown, protect James
against his own wUfulness. This the husband of the
heiress to the Crown could alone do. It must be
remembered also that, after becoming a pensioner
of France, James had begun to exhibit airs of inde
pendence of the French King, which inspired hopes
that he might be won over to the anti-Gallican
alliance. If James then could be reconciled with
the disaffected part of his subjects, there would be
little danger of his being thrown back for support on
the subsidies of France. But this loophole of escape
from revolution was closed by James' non-acceptance
of the offer of William. The fitting out of the
expedition of Monmouth in a Dutch port might
possibly have been prevented, notwithstanding the
sympathies of Amsterdam with the Duke, if WiUiam
had not desired to present to James the danger of
his position in a tangible form. Its actual sailing

WILLIAM AND MARY. 429
appears to have been the work of the authorities of
Amsterdam, who besides their sympathies with Mon
mouth's cause, might well wish to set up a rival
against the House of Orange, in the prospect of its
succession to the Government of England. Probably
WiUiam over-finessed in this instance, and the result
of Sedgmoor fight, although he would gladly have
prevented the conflict, must have been a real relief
to him. But the conduct of James, intoxicated by
his victory, and in his self-delusion identifying the
abstinence of influential Englishmen from active
support of the personal interests of Monmouth with
an indifference to the cause under cover of which
the Duke put forward those interests, became at last
such that there seemed to be no alternative between
a revolution which might ruin the prospects of the
whole family, and the estabUshment of a despotic
government in England, under the protectorate of
France. The birth of a Prince of Wales, besides
severing the immediate personal interests of James
and WiUiam, seemed to shut out conclusively the
future possible accession of England to the cause of
European independence. Then, urged by every con
sideration that could move a statesman, William
resolved to carry out his former idea in another
shape, and as he could no longer save the King, to
save his wife's rights, and protect Holland and
Europe from a great impending danger.
The result of the expedition of William to England

430 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
was his election to the throne of that kingdom,
nominaUy in conjunction with his wife, but with the
sole administration of the Government in his own
hands ; and the new King found himself at once face
to face with dangers and difficulties even greater
than those which he had already successfuUy en
countered. Independently of the disappointed re
action which is certaia to foUow such a great change,
the perplexities which must attend the position and
measures of any sovereign the basis of whose govern
ment is a successful revolution, must be always very
considerable ; for however much disposed he may be
to respect and guard the liberties of his new subjects,
he must necessarily be the organ of settled order and
lawful authority, and the occasions are rare indeed
on which he can escape from the autocratic associa
tions of such an office, and become the embodiment
and exponent of the sympathies and aspirations of
the governed masses. He may temper and compose
the spirit of irregular Uberty, but in so doing he must
frequently also curb and oppose it. On the other
hand, the very men whose resistance to the faUen
dynasty laid the foundations of his present authority
are usually, by the traditions of their party prin
ciples, rather the natural guardians of the liberties
of the subject than the champions of the Executive,
however constitutional may be its course, just as the
assertion of the Eoyal prerogative to some extent
appears to be almost inseparable from the possession

WILLIAM And MARY. 431
of the Eoyal office. Both WUliam and the Whig
leaders were called upon to break with the Past and
accommodate themselves as they best could to the
awkward and anomalous conditions of the Present,
and both were consequently always in an uneasy and
iU-deflned relation to one another, which could
hardly fail, whatever might be the individual cha
racters of the persons concerned, to produce em
barrassment and discord. There was this additional
complication, too, that WiUiam was more nearly
bound up with the Whig party, by the fact that they
had supported his personal pretensions to the Cro-wn
against the projects of the High Church and the
Protestant Tories, which involved a Eegency in the
name of James, or the sole election of his wife to the
throne. In WiUiam himself the love of power and
impatience of external resistance to his plans, to
which I have already adverted, and which must have
always rendered it difficult for him to endure the
criticism and delays of a popular system of govern
ment, were combined, with a proud spirit which was
always disposed to give way most when concession
was asked rather than demanded, and optional
instead of obUgatory, and to comply and co-operate
with those who had no ostensible claim on his
compUance, rather than with those who might claim
his favour by a sort of moral right. There can be
little doubt that he fretted under the sense of owing
his throne to any set of men, however eminent and

432 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
deserving, and felt a temptation to employ his scacely-
reclaimed opponents in their stead, from the mere
fact that with them he felt a greater freedom of will
and action. This is probably the explanation of the
calumnious reports spread against him by his enemies,
and retailed in some of the gossiping and uncritical
biographies of the present day, that he never forgave
a personal service that had been rendered him, but
always bore a grudge to his benefactor. The name
of Bentinck is sufficient to refute this statement in
the gross and injurious form in which it is usually
presented, but it is probably so far true that William
found it more easy to forgive an injury than to sus
tain the weight of a personal obligation.
Partly from some such considerations as those we
have just referred to, partly from a higher concep
tion of his duties as the King, not of one party but
of a whole nation, William was led to employ men
whose principles and whose antecedents and convic
tions were Tory, if not Jacobite. By several of these,
as well as by not a few of those who boasted of the
name of Whig, but had been disappointed, either
personally or politically, in the results of the Eevolu
tion, WiUiam was betrayed in a greater or less
degree — the treachery varying from a friendly and
deprecatory correspondence with the exiled Court of
St. Germains to a disclosure of projected enterprises
of William's government, which involved a loss of the
lives of EngUshmen and a lowering of the national

WILLIAM AND MARY. 433
honour. Can it be wondered at that, narrowed in
his confldences by the uncompromising principles of
a few and the treason of many, William fell back
more and more on Holland and on Favouritism?
The general national prejudice against Dutchmen,
and the popular intolerance of the associations and
friendships which he had formed under other cir
cumstances, and which would naturally always be
more to him than any mere English associations,
seemed to WUliam gross ingratitude on the part of
those for whose deliverance he had done so much,
and he felt authorised and even driven to protect,
against the consequences of their invidious eminence,
the future position of those who encountered with
him the storm of popular dislike. The very sense
that what he was doing was perilous to himself and
prejudicial to his personal interests served only with
a man of his temperament to render his proceedings
more trenchant and reckless ; and the disclosure of
the enormous grants made out of the forfeited lands
in Ireland and the Crown la,nds elsewhere to his
favourites and his mistress, scandalised even those
who had been the most uncompromising vindicators
of his conduct. The dismissal of his Dutch Guards,
which was wrung from him about the same time, if
it showed a great want of consideration on the part
of Englishmen for the feelings of one to whom they
owed so much, and "whose great merits they were
compelled to admit, also demonstrated most pain-
F F

434 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
fully a want of penetration as well as adroitness in
William himself in dealing with National sentiment.
But for this, the dismissal of the Guards would never
have been demanded, or would have been volunteered
by the King himself before the national desire
assumed the form of a demand. But William
laboured under the delusion that national confidence
and sympathy could be commanded simply by the
pursuit of a noble line of policy, and by a general
regard to justice and legality. He never learnt how
much more depends on a careful attention to little
arts of personal demeanour, and on complaisance in
trifles, and how by these social qualifications a bad
man and an unprincipled king such as Charles the
Second may be able to achieve a popularity which
was denied to himself. He was too proud to bend
his mind to such lower means of appea.Ung to public
sentiment, and he found some colour for his want
of effort in this direction in his unfamiliarity with
the English language, and his foreign education and
tastes. He was, in fact, the Coriolanus of English
Kings in this respect, and thoroughly despised
popular judgment. Nor were his public services to
Europe such as would recommend themselves imme
diately or forcibly to the popular English mind. To
begin with, though an experienced General, William
was not a successful one, and with consummate pre
sence of mind and considerable military skill, he could
lay no claim to the character of a great military genius.

WILLIAM AND MARY. 435
His struggle against the power of France, though
persistent, and in the end to a great degree success
ful, was not a brUliant one, and was marked rather by
the capacity of retrieving military disasters, than of
exciting the popular enthusiasm by great victories.
His very courage, though heroic in fact, had nothing
of the romantic in its fashion, and the romantic and
sentimental, after all, have the most powerful hold,
next to the religious, over the popular mind.
WiUiam's romance and William's sentiment were
confined to and concentrated in two quarters — his
few intimate friends and his wife. With the former
his coldness and his formal reserve altogether dis
appeared, and he was the warm-hearted sympathiser
and unceremonious companion. Here the rebound
of his character took place, and carried him to an
excess in a direction quite opposite to that of his
ordinary self-restraint. Bentinck and Keppel, it is
weU known, held the highest places in his favour.
The former commanded his deep esteem and con
fidence by his shrewd ability and entire devotion to
WUliam. The latter engaged his affections by his
attractive personal manners and engaging qualities.
Neither could disarm the national prejudice, and in
the case of Bentinck it was as intense as indiscri-
minating. But Bentinck was a statesman — Keppel
Uttle more than an accomplished courtier. They
repaid the King's favour by unwavering fidelity ; but
F P 2

436 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
they rendered his private life often very uncomfor
table by their mutual jealousy.
William's relations with his wife were so peculiar
that, even with our tolerably complete knowledge of
the character of both husband and wife, it is difficult
fuUy to realise them. Mary Stuart, or, as she may
be more distinctively caUed, Mary of Orange, was
one of those self-suppressed characters whose life is
voluntarily sunk in that of another, and yet whose
own personal features weU deserve a separate recog
nition. Not possessed of commanding abilities, and,
though lively and affable, with no pretensions to
those briUiant drawing-room accomplishments which
have made Frenchwomen the autocrats of a world of
their own, Mary possessed that most valuable quality,
thorough good sense, in its most refined and engaging
form. Her perceptions were clear and generally
correct, her power of discrimination was unusually
keen, and her reasonableness was as marked as it is
uncommon. But the great beauty of her character
lay in the sweet and well-ordered harmony of her
mind, in which there was room for no disorder,
except when its serenity was ruffled by the outbreaks
of one ruling passion, — her intense devotion to her
husband, and resentment of any injury or affront to
him. This feeling controUed every thought and
regulated every word and act of Mary. Admiration,
a sense of protection, and a self- identifying syTupathy
were the main ingredients of this womanly devotion.

WILLL^M AND MARY. 437
The self-sacriflce tendered by such a nature was
inteUigent and unobtrusive, and before its influence
the natural jealousies and most painful circumstances
of their relative positions vanished. She convinced
William that she had, with simple unconsciousness
of any other possible course, renounced in his favour
aU the distinctive privileges and authority of her
personal right to the Crown, and by her eager self-
identification with his cause she guarded him against
the self-reproach of having compelled her to sacrifice
to him her secondary duties as a daughter. That
she herself should escape reproach and calumny on
this latter point was impossible, but when we re
member the early age at which she lost sight of her
father and became part of the life of her husband,
and the little tenderness which was ever exhibited
by that father towards her, and stUl less towards him
in whom her very existence was wrapt up, we shall
not be much inclined to estimate the offence against
famUy ties very highly. That there always remained
a respectful and kindly consideration for her father
in his misfortunes and exile, Burnet and others who
had personal opportunities of watching her closely
strongly testify, and their evidence is confirmed by
the unaffected testimony of her own pen. In one
of her letters to WiUiam, written while the latter
was on his Irish campaign, which have happily been
preserved to us, there is a quiet reference to this
mutuaUy recognised feeling which speaks for itself.

438 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
In acknowledging the news of the battle of the Boyne
Mary writes, ' He [Lord Nottingham] brought me
your letter yesterday, and I could not hold, so he saw
me cry, which I have hindered myself from before
everybody till then that it was impossible ; and this
morning, when I heard the joyful news from Mr.
Butler, I was in pain to know what was become of
the late King, and durst not ask him; but when
Lord Nottingham came, I did venture to do it, and I
had the satisfaction to know he was safe. I know
I need not beg you to let him be taken care of, for I
am confident you will for your own sake ; yet add
that to all your kindness, and for my sake, let people
know you would have no hurt come to his person.
Forgive me this.' Her strange and seemingly un
feeling conduct when she first entered Whitehall
Palace after the fiight of James, is explained by
Burnet on her own authority as a piece of over
acting on her part, in consequence of an intimation
from William, that if she seemed melancholy people
would think she disapproved of his expedition. A
passage in one of her letters to her husband seems to
confirm this explanation : — ' I never did anything
without thinking : " Now it may be, you are in the
greatest dangers, and yet I must see company upon
my set days ; I must play twice a week; nay, I must
laugh and talk, tho' never so much against my will : "
I believe I dissemble very ill to those who know me,
at least 'tis a great constraint to myself, yet I must

WILLIAM AND MARY. 439
endure it. All my motions are so wretched, and aU
I do so observed, that if I eat less, or speak less, or
look more grave, all is lost in the opinion of the
world ; so that I have this misery added to that of
your absence, and my fears of your dear person, that
I must grin when my heart is ready to break, and
talk when my heart is so oppressed I can scarce
breathe.' On one point the devotion of the wife to
the husband was sorely tried in the case of Mary, and
her conduct here also has been looked upon as a
proof of her coldness, if not coarseness of tempera
ment. William, though in reality her passionate
devotion to him scarcely surpassed his deep-rooted
attachment to her, was an unfaithful husband, and
though decorous in his indulgence in vice, did not
conceal his faithlessness from his wife. As far as we
know, she, true to her canon of never acknowledging
to herself, or in the eyes of the world, an injury from
her husband, ignored the matter, and tolerated the
mistress in her train. Whatever she may have felt
in her secret heart, Mary had obliterated from her
canon aU rights of her own as against her husband,
and sensitive as her nature was in many points, it
had also a certain matter-of-fact unsentimentality
which permitted her to weigh in the balance con
flicting feelings and duties where most women would
have abandoned themselves unreservedly to natural
impulses. If she complained to William, the pubUc
never heard the echo of her remonstrance ; and she

440 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
combated the rival influences of mistress and favour
ites by a redoubled self-devotion to him, which was,
there can be no doubt, one great ingredient in the
bitterness of his agony when she was taken from him
by death. The key, perhaps, to her passive endurance
in this extreme case, and of her control of her natural
emotion in the case of her fllial responsibilities, lay
in the fact that the faintness of her imaginativeness
in comparison with her practical good sense, except
where her husband's safety was concerned, prevented
her from exaggerating to her own mind the gravity
of this conflict of duties, and enabled her to decide
on her proper line of action or inaction from a
comparatively calm survey of actual facts. Her
untutored piety taught her that there must be a
right path which she might pursue, and having
ascertained it to her o-wn satisfaction, she performed
her supposed duty without further misgivings, and
perhaps even with little trouble of mind. William,
who did justice to her high qualities, observed to
Lord Shrewsbury when he left her as Eegent during
his absence, that she would know better how to suit
the English people than he did; and the result proved
the truth of his judgment, for the occasional glimpses
which Englishmen had of the distinct regal person
ality of Mary, added to the popularity which her
pleasing and courteous manners and her piety and
charities as a woman had already secured, gave her

WILLIAM AND MARY. 441
a hold on their affection and devotion which was never
once shaken.
It would be doing injustice to the memory of
William to estimate his humanity and clemency by
such exceptional events as the massacre of Glencoe,
which he certainly countenanced, if he did not
expressly order it ; or bj' his implacable resentment
in the case of a few individuals, such as Sir John
Fenwick. He was not in himself either bloodthirsty
or revengeful; he again and again moderated the
severity of victorious retribution, and there are few
kings who have forgiven more often or more personal
injuries than he. But where his judgment or pre
judices decided that severity was the course demanded
from him, the iron discipline to which he had sub
jected his own mind seemed to deaden for the time
any perception of cruelty or feeling of compassion.
The narrow and intolerant enthusiasm of one section
of the Scotch people did not more offend his reason
as a thinking man, than the iU-regulated imperium
in imperio of the Clan system irritated and alarmed
his sensibilities as a ruler. He saw in the bloody
retribution at Glencoe a fortunate blow and a neces
sary warning to this insubordinate spirit, and with
this consideration the actual slaughter affected him
very faintly, even when pressed on his attention by
public outcry. In the case of individuals, if he were
not convinced in his mind that the individual was
-rather culpable than essentially criminal, he saw no

442 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
reason to interfere with the sword of justice, unless
the individual and the occasion were alike unworthy
of so grave an act. In his forgiveness he was just
and magnanimous rather than generous and com
passionate. Perhaps, after all, the defect in WiUiam's nature,
which lay at the bottom of his mal-adroitness in con-
cUiating popular feeling, and of the unattractiveness
of his demeanour, was his almost absolute want of
the faculty of imagination. Every one has felt on
a consideration of his character that, whatever its
merits, it presented a most complete contrast to that
of such a man as Sir Philip Sidney ; and the contrast,
if pushed into detail, would elucidate considerably
the character of each. Sir Philip lived in an ideal
world, apart from the hard and morally forbidding
world of reality presented by that age, but which
ideal world yet reflected a certain glow of external
beauty and romance over even this hard reality. But
beyond this his life was purposeless and disappointing.
This is Chivalry in its very essence. William, though
high-minded and armed with a noble purpose in life,
was essentially unchivalrous. His energetic and
unfaltering pursuit of a great end was not the
realisation of an imaginative ideal, but an act of
reason and duty and religious faith. Men and events
presented themselves to his mind in their sober and
unattractive reality. He could not conceive of and
therefore was unable to appeal to that hidden world

WILLIAM AND MARY. 443
of sentiment and undeflned emotion which underlies
not only the individual mind, but the self-conscious
ness of a nation, and which from time to time, by its -
intervention, confounds the most careful calculations
of events. He appealed only to bare facts and to
cold reason and stern duty, while the nation was
longing for a trumpet-call, however wildly blown,
which might summon it away from the lower
calculations of worldly wisdom to the higher en
thusiasm of emotional loyalty and patriotism. Mary
possessed the instincts of a woman to supply partially
the want of imagination which was common to her
self and her husband. But in his masculine nature
it was the source of much of that forbidding and
sometimes almost brutal moroseness of demeanour
which deprived him of the love of his people, though
it could not whoUy rob him of their scarcely self-
acknowledged admiration and reliance. The same
mental peculiarity which made him despise poetry
and literature, which recognised the fine arts only in
their stiffest and most realistic developments, which
deUghted in a stately uniformity of courts and walks
and avenues, that left nothing to the imagination,
and, like his own policy, was impressive rather
than attractive to the common mind, crippled his,
endeavours to reconstitute English society and con
solidate the English Constitution, and made him,
with all his acknowledged merits, an unpopular
king.

444 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Yet withall his drawbacks, moral and intellectual,
William was not only a high-minded and able states
man, but essentially a noble man. Insensibly, under
the influence of his high purpose and persevering
faith in its realisation, the general standard, as
distinct from that of individuals and courtiers, was
elevated from the degradation of the preceding
period ; and the flrst symptoms of a future amend
ment in political morals appeared in the attention
excited by acts of corruption. Corruption was still
dominant, but it was recognised in its true colours.
There was great mismanagement in the processes of
government, but the ends of the administration were
no longer evil. There was still a struggle between
Prerogative and Constitutional Eights, but it was a
misunderstanding between purposes equally praise
worthy, and no longer a conflict against selflsh
misrule and a low-toned despotism. The Euler was
not loved, but he was respected ; and if England was
uneasy and dissatisfied at home, she had regained
her natural weight in the scale of European nations.
He who could achieve aU this under such disad
vantageous conditions, and in so brief a time, could
not have been a bad man, and cannot be estimated as
a wholly unsuccessful Euler.

445

ANNE.
It is scarcely possible to conceive of a greater con
trast in respect of greatness than that presented be
tween the reign and the character of Anne Stuart.
The reign, although it occupied but a small fractional
part of the life of the Queen, was, in point of results,
one of the most important in the annals of England,
— the Queen, though she was one of the best-in
tention ed and most conscientious of our Sovereigns,
was at the same time one of the least able and
most common-place. Although her peculiarities and
weaknesses really determined to a great degree not
only the fate of the English Constitution, but the
whole course of European events, she seems to us
now in herself rather an accident than an essential
part of her own reign. A youthful fancy, confirmed
by habit, placed her at the almost absolute command
of an able but rapacious and overbearing woman,
and to the accident of this woman becoming the
wife of John Churchill we owe nearly all of national
greatness that is associated with the name of Queen

446 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Anne. Had this imperious favourite not obtained
this ascendancy over the mind of a weak Princess,
the armies of England might never have been com
manded by the great General who led them to
victory, and the power of Louis the Fourteenth
might have remained unbroken, or even have be
come still more paramount in Europe. So, had
Sarah Jennings been as capable of retaining as she
was of gaining an ascendancy over the mind of her
royal mistress, the influence of France over the
affairs of Europe might have been suspended for
many years — even if that country itself should have
escaped dismemberment — and the empire and re
sources of Spain might have been once more placed
at the disposal of the House of Austria. Again,
had not the sentiments of Marlborough's wife and
the opportunities for a display of his military
abilities afforded by the great European contest
against the power of France gradually estranged his
sympathies from the Tory party and its High-Church
and Eight-Divine associations, and drawn him to
wards the leaders of the Whig party, the fortune of
whose cause hung on the issue of that European
contest, Anne might have been left entirely to the
impulses of her own religious and political predi
lections, and the Crown of Great Britain might have
passed, either by substitution or succession, to the
exiled but legitimate heir of the House of Stuart, to
the entire exclusion of the Protestant House of

ANNE. 447
Hanover. England, in that case, might have been
doomed to a repetition of the great Civil Wars of the
preceding century and on an equal scale. On the
other hand, had not the subtle and intriguing Harley
succeeded in flnding a suitable instrument for his
purpose of undermining the position of Marlborough
in the ' very humble ' Abigail Hill (better known as
Mrs. Masham), Anne might have never dared to
rebel against the tyranny of the Duchess of Marl
borough, and England might have taken the place of
France as the arbiter of Europe, and in her turn pro
voked a hostile European coalition. As it was, Anne
Stuart, herself deeply imbued with the principles of
Eight Divine, ascended the throne and remained
upon it to the end of her life, to the exclusion of the
legitimate heir; called to her counsels men whose
principles she detested, and for whom she had no
personal regard, and curtailed her reign of its grow
ing European reputation and lowered for the time
the position of England by what was certainly in
itself an inglorious and discreditable pacification,
though it may have reaUy been a not unfortunate
event for the more lasting interest of this country.
From beginning to end, this Queen, with more
marked political and religious preferences than the
majority of our Princes, was almost a passive puppet
of external circumstances, and a tool alternately of
two parties, the principles of one of which outraged
her most cherished feelings, and the designs of the

448 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
most efficient members of the other of which men
aced the very existence of her royal authority.
As in the case of William the Third, no doubt, the
anomalous position of Anne from her early years had
a good deal to do with this strange paralysis of
personal character; but, as in his case, the cha
racter itself had stUl more dnect influence. Anne
lost at an early age the support and guidance of a
mother ; and although we have no reason to suppose
that the influence of Anne Hyde would have tended
much to the elevation of her daughter's character,
yet it might have absorbed, in a more wholesome
manner, some of that excessive craving for sympa
thetic and reassuring friendship which the timid and
helpless nature of Anne always exhibited, and which
made her the slave of Sarah of Marlborough.
The care and superintendence of an energetic step
mother might have prevented this ascendancy, but
Mary of Modena, in addition to the disadvantages
inseparable from this difficult position, was a Eoman
Catholic of a very extreme and bigoted type, while
the only influence which shared the sway over the
mind of Anne with friendship was a strong religious
conviction. Fortunately for her ultimate chances of
succession to the throne of England, Anne was edu
cated by divines of the Anglican communion, and
such a mind as hers became entirely subjugated by
the system of High-Church Protestantism which
recommended itself to her by preferring authorita-

ANNE. 449
tive guidance, while leaving her a nominal freedom.
At the same time, it laid sufficient stress on the
necessity of forms and ceremonies to present her re
ligious duty to her in a concrete form, in which she
might discharge it without much call upon her
intellectual powers, or disturbing appeals to her
moral consciousness. To the convictions thus early
adopted Anne clung with the tenacity which is so
often exhibited on one or two points by a mind which
is in general irresolute and -vaciUating. It may seem
strange that one with such views should have found
a congenial associate in Lady Churchill, whose
theological opinions were as openly latitudinarian as
her character was unscrupulous. But this divergence
between the friends wa,s really one of the^ things
which contributed to confirm the ascendancy of the
favourite. Lady Churchill had from the first as
sumed the role of the candid friend who flatters not,
and while she made this a pretext for allowing some
part of her naturally domineering and insolent spirit
tci display itself openly in her demeanour towards
Anne, she recommended herself to the confiding yet
anxious and suspicious temperament of her mistress,
by this apparent independence and honesty on such
an important point of divergence. And perhaps,
after all, Anne felt a little of the pleasure which very
good people sometimes experience in thus indulging
in a questionable and contraband enjoyment. Mary
of Orange, who did not relish what she had seen and

450 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
heard of her sister's favourite, ventured to give her
a warning, and Anne thus meets one of the charges
against Lady Churchill : — ' It is true she is not so
strict as some are, nor does she keep such a bustle
with Eeligion, which I confess, I think, is none the
worse, for one sees so many saints mere devils, that
if one be a good Christian, the less show one makes
the better, in my opinion. Then, as for moral prin
ciples, it is impossible to have better, and without all
that, lifting up of the hands and eyes, and often
going to church, wiU prove but a very lame devo
tion.' There is an ingenuity and good sense in this
plea, which, whether it represented Anne's delibe
rate sentiment, or was a mere passing expression in
spired by her desire to excuse her anomalous friend
ship, satisfied Mary that the only way was to endea
vour to influence her sister through Lady Churchill,
whom from that time she tried to conciliate. The
friends, in their joint pursuit of a perfectly candid
friendship, had agreed to employ in their correspond
ence the more familiar names of ' Mrs. Morley ' and
' Mrs. Freeman ; ' and one letter wiU suffice as an
Ulustration of the terms on which they stood in the
heyday of their attachment. Anne writes to her
favourite, — 'Dear Mrs. Freeman may easily imagine
I cannot have much to say since I saw her. .How
ever, I must write two words ; for though I believe
she does not doubt of my constancy, seeing how base

ANNE. 451
and false all the world is, I am of that temper, I
think, I can never say enough to assure you of it.
Therefore, give me leave to assure you they can
never change me. And there is no misery I cannot
readUy resolve to suffer, rather than the thought
of parting from you. And 1 do swear, I would
sooner be torn in pieces than alter this my resolu-
ion. My dear Mrs. Freeman, I beg to hear from
you.' A romantic ' eternal friendship ' such as this,
very common in the early annals of young ladies, has
generally its euthanasia in the marriage of one of the
contracting parties, but there was assuredly no ro
mance in the marriage-lot of Anne to rival the claims
of friendship. Charles the Second's witty saying as to
the hopeless dulness of Prince George of Denmark is
weU known, and although Anne herself had no very
fine intellectual susceptibUities to be outraged by this
prosaic associate, she must have been devoid of all
imagination and aU youthful sentiment if she had not
experienced some want of a familiar interchange of
ideas with a rather more interesting companion than
her husband. Thus the hopeless stolidity of Prince
George was an invaluable auxiliary to the ambition
of Sarah Churchill. That lady's brilliant and au
dacious qualities had indeed for Anne aU the at
tractive piquancy of contrast to her husband's, as
weU as to her own, and until they assumed the form of
exacting insolence and incessant jealous upbraiding,
Ge 2

452 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
they supplied to Anne's anxious aud timid nature all
the pleasurable support and excitement of a stimu
lating drink.
Notwithstanding, however, what to some women
would have been the intolerable companionship of such
a husband as the one she was mated to, Anne was a
happy as well as an affectionate wife, and a devoted,
though most unfortunate mother. Child after child
was bom only to die in infancy or childhood. Here
the character of Anne displayed itself to best
advantage. Her naturaUy kind and affectionate
heart made her feel keenly what her deep and un
affected piety enabled her to bear with touching
resignation. On one occasion the deaths of two
children came in the closest succession, and at a time
when she was attending the sick-bed of her husband,
and Lady Eussell gives us a picture of the two
parents which deserves a place by the side of the less
respectful portraits which history has handed down
to us of both in their public capacities. 'The
good Princess,' she writes, ' has taken her chastise
ment heavily ; the first relief of that sorrow pro
ceeded from calming of a greater, the Prince being
so ill of a fever. I never saw any relation more
moving than that of seeing them together. Some
times they wept, sometimes they mourned in words,
and hand-in-hand, — he sick in bed, she the carefullest
nurse to him that can be imagined.'
Her relations with her father and step-mother are

ANNE. 458
a less pleasing subject. James was one of those
fathers who are profoundly convinced that an
excessive indulgence to their children (especially
when young) should command throughout life not
only a gratitude corresponding in kind, but an ab
solute devotion in the most important matters. He
seemed to expect that his eldest daughter, in the un
broken correspondence which he exacted froin her
until the Eevolution severed them for ever, should
write always with a sense of the paramount claims
of a father over those of a husband. So with Anne, al
though he was himself sacrificing his family interests
to his mistaken idea of his Eeligious duty, and his
theory of the absolute authority of the Crown, he could
not for a moment recognise the right of his daughter
to obey the dictates of her religious convictions, which
identified the success of his cause with the destruction
of her own cherished Church. He could never see in
her the duty-obeying woman, but only the ungrateful
and unfilial chUd. Anne's motives in joining with
her sister and brother-in-law against her father were,
no doubt, mixed ones, in which duty only formed one
ingredient. She had never been on pleasant terms
of intimacy with her step-mother, and towards her
father her feelings had, in consequence, even from a
domestic point of view, become much diminished in
warmth. The difficult problem of the duties of a
father between the chUdren of a former marriage and
• the wife of his subsequent choice was scarcely likely

464 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
to receive a satisfactory solution in the case of persons
with the peculiarities and intellectual inferiority of
James and Anne. James, like other fathers in a
simUar position, seems to have thought it the impe
rative duty of his children to fall in love with any
woman he might himself prefer, and to continue un
diminished towards himself that affection which, in
the eyes of his children, he now bestowed on them in
only a secondary degree. Mary of Modena, so far as
we can trace her action, does not seem to have been
a harsh or wilfully unjust step-mother, and appears,
at any rate, to have sought to conciliate the affections
of her step-daughter. But Anne, previously dis
posed to anticipate ill-treatment, under the influence
of a nature especially sensitive on smaU points of
ceremonial and observance, was only too ready to
misconstrue the acts of the Queen, who, whether a
judicious, was in this respect certainly not a
successful, diplomatist. Anne revenged herself for
supposed slights and ill-will by pouring out her
complaints and innuendoes against her step-mother
in letters to her sister Mary- ; and in these letters her
father and his second wife figure under the un
ceremonious names of ' Mansel ' and ' Mansel's wife.'
Mary, however, as we learn from Anne's own com
plaint, would take no notice of these insinuations
against the unwelcome relative, though she was
almost as little inclined towards her as her sister, and
had a keener sense of her dangerous influence over

ANNE. 455
James as an ardent Eoman Catholic. Anne had
evidently a certain pleasure in fancying herself a
victim of domestic injustice, and it is ludicrous to
read her expressions of surprise that she had not yet
been persecuted for her religious belief, and her
confident anticipations of the coming trial to her
faith and constancy. The announcement of the
probable birth of a child, which, should it prove a
boy, would shut out both her sister and herself from
the succession to the Crown, provoked the jealous sus-.
picions of Anne to the utmost, and she had evidently
made up her mind, under any circumstances, to dis
believe in a boy. The excessive jubilation of the
Eoman Catholic party at the event, and the great
importance to their cause of such an occurrence at
this crisis, were facts quite sufficient to carry conviction
for the time to such a mind as that of Anne. Indeed,
joined to other circumstances, they did the same
to those whose inteUects were better capable of
estimating evidence, as weU as to the great mass of
the nation. At a subsequent period, indeed, these
suspicions gave way before other and stronger feelings,
and before she was called upon to ascend the throne
herself, Anne had recognised in mind and in words
the unlucky Eoman Catholic heir as her true brother.
At the crisis of the Eevolution, however, she acted
under the combined influence of a deep sense of her
religious duty, of a strong prejudice against her step
mother, and of an angry belief that the rights of her

456 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
sister and herself had been outraged by an iniquitous
Popish conspiracy.
There can be but little doubt that the influence
of Sarah Churchill had been exerted to increase the
bias of Anne against her step-mother, and to inflame
her suspicions respecting her supposed brother. The
same influence was from that time directed to the
fostering of ill-will between the Princess and her
sister and brother-in-law. The favourite thought
her influence insecure if it were shared in any degree
with another person, and demanded and long enforced
a perfect monopoly not only of intimate friendship,
but of ordinary friendly intercourse. She probably
knew that Mary of Orange had endeavoured to warn
Anne against her growing influence, and this she
would never forgive, even had not the intellectual ca
pacity of Mary herself rendered her a dangerous rival
in the guidance of Anne. The unavowed but natural
rivalry between WiUiam the Third and Marlborough
added largely to the growth of an i]l--will between
their wives, each of whom was a most devout admirer
of her husband's abilities, and equally jealous for
his interests and reputation, though their conjugal
devotion manifested itself in the one case in passive
obedience, in the other in a shrewish tyranny. The
baseness and treachery which were so strangely
blended in Marlborough with such noble qualities
brought on his public disgrace. Mary insisted on
Anne abandoning the society of the wife of a man

ANNE. 457
thus situated. The best as well as the weakest parts
of Anne's character were roused in opposition to such
a demand, and the natural obstinacy of both sisters
on certain points, increased perhaps by the know
ledge of Anne's penitential communications with her
father, rendered the breach almost if not quite
irreparable. It is still a disputed point whether a,
reconciliation was effected when Queen Mary lay on
her death-bed. The death of Mary, however, seems
to have softened the heart of Anne towards her
brother-in-law, and at the death of William she was
on fairly good terms with him, and Marlborough had
been pardoned his offences and restored to outward
favour. The accession of Anne herself to the throne placed
her, as has been already said, in a most painful
dilemma between conflicting views of duty. On the
one hand, stood the rights of her now acknowledged
brother, and her own theory of indefeasible heredi
tary right; on the other, her sense of duty to the
Church of England, strengthened by her own
antipathy to Eoman Catholicism. The scale was
turned against an abdication by the active opposition
of Marlborough and his wife, and the persistent
though passive resistance of George of Denmark,
added to the Queen's own natural timidity. This
last feature in her character had reaUy great influence
over the course of politics during her reign. It pre
cipitated her first estrangement from the Tory chiefs

458 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
whom she had summoned to her counsels at her
accession, but whose violent course with respect to
the Nonconformists alarmed her as to a possible
renewal of civil con-vulsions. The somewhat violent
conduct of the Whigs, when in their turn they pos
sessed the power, joined to the distrust which the
Queen entertained of their attachment to the
established Church, in some degree nerved her to
the effort to shake off the yoke of the Duchess of
Marlborough. The conduct of the favourite since
the accession of her mistress to the throne had been
almost incredibly foolish. She had always ruled over
Anne by open dictation, but this had hitherto been
blended with affectionate acknowledgment of favours'
had respected outward appearances, and had not
humiliated the Princess in the eyes of the public.
But Sarah Churchill had indulged her own insolence
of spirit so much that it was no longer under her
own control, and instead of recognising in the change
from Princess to Queen a reason for softening the
tone of her dictation and relaxing her claim to a
monopoly of confidence and favour, she sought to
secure her power by increased and less guarded
imperiousness, by additional exorbitancy of demands,
and by a string of jealous and bitter reproaches
which made her society and her letters a constant
source of vexation and discomfort to the Queen
instead of a pleasure and a support. She fell a
victim at last to her own jealous selfishness. Fearing

ANNE. 459
the influence of any woman at all resembling herself
in character, she placed near the Queen only those
whose inferiority of inteUect and seeming humUity
appeared to afford a guarantee against their becom
ing her rivals ; but she never anticipated that to one
who, like Anne, was thoroughly disgusted with the
opposite qualities as exemplified in the Duchess
herself, these signs of a gentler and less powerful
character would have an especial attraction. For
a long time, however, Anne dared only intrigue
secretly against her haughty tyrant, and even when
the breach was a declared one, she encountered the
remonstrances of the fallen favourite with the de
fensive attitude of dogged suUenness. The follow
ing description of a scene between the Queen and the
Duchess, though it may have been somewhat em-
beUished by the witty malignity of the latter, is
probably substantiaUy a faithful picture, and is too
characteristic to be omitted : —
Upon the 6th of April, 1710, I follo-wed my letter to Kensington, so
soon that Her Majesty could not -write another harsh letter, -which I
found she intended. I sent a page of the backstairs to acquaint Her
Majesty that I was there. She -was alone ; ho-srever, the man stayed
longer than -was usual upon such occasions, and then told me the Queen
-would have me come in. As soon as I opened the door, she said she
-was going to -write to me. ' Upon vfhat. Madam ? ' said I.
The Queen — ' I did not open your letter tiU justno-w, and I -was going
to write to you.'
Lady Marlborough—' Was there anything in it, Madam, that you had
a mind to answer? '
The Queen,—' I think there is nothing you can have to say, but you
can.*write it.'

460 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Lady Marlborough — ' Won't your Majesty give me leave to tell it
you?' The Queen — ' Whatever you have to say you may write it.'
Lady Marlborough — 'Indeed, I can't tell how to put such sort of
things into writing.'
TJi£ Queen — ' You may put it into writing.'
Lady Marlborough — 'Won't your Majesty allow me to tell it yon,
now I am here ? '
The Queen — ' You may put it into writing.'
Lady Marlborough — ' I believe your Majesty never did so hard thing
to anybody as to refuse to hear them speak, even the meanest person
that ever desired it.'
The Queen— 'Yes, I do bid people put what they have to say in
writing, when I have a mind to it.'
Lady Marlborough — ' I have nothing to say. Madam, upon the subject
that is so uneasy to you; that person is not, that I know of, at all con
cerned in the account that I would give you, which I can't be quiet till
I have told you.'
The Qtieen — ' You may put it into writing.'
After a long expostulatory monologue from the
Duchess, the Queen retires towards the door re
turning no answers to the impassioned appeals of
the Duchess but the following : — ' You said you
desire no answer, and I shaU give you none.' ' I will
go out of the room.' ' You said you desire no answer,
and I shall give you none.' And so the interview
comes to an end.
Once emancipated from her bondage to the Duchess
of Marlborough, the Queen was determined never
again to be the passive tool of any of her servants,
and her mode of asserting her independence Ulustrates
weU the inferiority of her intellect. Incapable, really,
of judging on the most serious matters, and self-
distrustful on nearly all matters, she could not or did

ANNE. 461
not venture to discuss them with her advisers on the
basis of a rational argument, but met them all alike
with uniform objection and delay. Swift tells us
that 'the Queen grew so jealous upon the change of
her servants, that often, from the fear of being
imposed on and over-caution, she would impose upon
herself. She took a delight in refusing those who
were thought to have had the greatest power with
her, even in the most reasonable things, nor would
she let them be done until she feU into the humour
of it herself  ' When a person happened to
be recommended to her as useful for her service or
proper to be obliged, perhaps, after a long delay, she
would consent ; but if the treasurer offered at the
same time a wa,rrant or other instrument to her,
already prepared, in order to be signed, because he
presumed on her consent beforehand, she would not ;
and thus the affair would sometimes be for several
weeks together, although the thing were ever so
reasonable, or that even the public suffered by the
delay.' The same -writer intimates that this curious
mode of self-assertion on the part of the Queen had
the important result of baffiing the plans of those
among her ministers who were anxious to pave the
way by preparatory measures for the succession of the
'Chevalier de St. George,' as the legitimate Stuart
Prince was styled. The hesitation and delays of
Anne left them at her death unorganised and helpless
spectators of the rapid and determined measures of

462 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
their political opponents for the peaceful proclama
tion and acknowledgment of George of Hanover. In
this particular case, the Queen's humour was
strengthened by her natural timidity, which led her
to shrink from committing herself to any decided step
in favour of her brother. To this was added the
dislike entertained by herself, in common with many
sovereigns, to the presence and public recognition of
successor. Both the Protestant Tory party and the
Whigs had in turn experienced her grave displeasure
at a proposal that the Electoral family should be
invited to England ; and, in the case of the Chevalier,
Anne could not free her mind from the additional
terror that his presence in the United Kingdom might
be speedily foUowed by her own deposition in his
favour. She could not be blind to the fact that a
recognition of his claims to the throne in any form,
however contingent, implied a confession of usurp
ation on her part which must seriously undermine her
authority. The portrait which I have endeavoured to draw, as
must be evident, is rather that of a somewhat com
mon-place private individual than of a sovereign.
Yet Anne had in public, at any rate, the external
bearing of a queen, and she possessed one or two
truly queenly qualities, which raise her memory above
entire contempt. She had a high idea of the dignity
of the royal position, and an even exaggerated sense
of the importance of State ceremonial and the stage

ANNE. 468
effects of Eoyalty. Her countenance, though heavy
and devoid of the charm of intelligence, was comely
and even impressive from its repose. Her expression
as well as her demeanour, in public, was generally
pleasing and gracious. But she had ideas of Eoyalty
which went beyond mere ceremonial demeanour.
Her sense of duty, though narrow, was strong ; and
she had a real affection for her subjects as such, and
an unselfish desire to promote their happiness, which
could not fail to call forth a corresponding feeling
of attachment and love on their part. This feeling
was weU expressed, as in the case of Wordsworth's
' Shepherd Lord,' in the title of ' Good Queen Anne,'
by which she was popularly known. In the reigns of
her successors her memory retained its hold over the
popular sympathies, and her kindly and charitable
disposition was looked back to with fond regret.
Anne was selfish only in trifles, in great matters she
was generous and self-sacrificing. Her munificence
and her private as weU as her public charities were
truly Eoyal. Her attachment to the Church of
England was with her more than a mere article of
faith, and received strong practical exemplification in
her sacrifice of the First Fruits, and in the fund for
the endowment of the poorer clergy, which is still
known as ' Queen Anne's Bounty.' If she was
occasionaUy petulant and acrimonious, this want of
amiability proceeded from inferiority of mind rather
than from natural disposition.

464 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
Her true nature, if dull and incapable of the higher
moods of feeling, was gentle and inoffensive. Her
judgment was often distorted by prejudice, under the
influence of which she became anxiously suspicious,
while in some instances she showed an unforgiving
temper and an implacable resentment. But she was
in general long-suffering and considerate, and her
bitterest resentments were free from vindictiveness.
She could be generous even in her hatred, as her un
deserved bounty to the Duchess of Marlborough after
the disgrace of that favourite sufficiently testifies.
Perhaps, if we consider the beneficial influence over
the mind of a nation of a really good though weak
character in the prominent situation of sovereign, we
may feel that we have undervalued the signiflcance of
Anne's personal qualities, and assigned her a lower
place among our Sovereigns than is warranted in
fact. But however we may congratulate ourselves
on the fortunate manner in which events actually
developed themselves, notwithstanding her feebleness
of mind and her peculiar prejudices, it is impossible
to shut our eyes to what might have been the
consequences of this dangerous weakness ; and while
we are wiUing to acquiesce in the contemporary
verdict which affirmed her essential goodness, we are
compeUed to deny altogether in her case any claim to
the rank of a great sovereign.

465

GEOBGE THE FIBST.
Lord Stanhope introduces his notice of the reign
of George the First with the foUo-wing remark : — ' A
hard fate that the enthronement of a stranger should
have been the only means to secure our liberties and
laws ! Almost a century of foreign masters ! Such
has been the indirect, but the undoubted effect of
the Great EebeUion. Charles and James, driven
abroad by the tumults at home, received a French
education and pursued a French policy. Their
Government was overthrown by a Dutchman ; George
the First and George the Second were entirely
German ; and thus, from 1660 to 1760, when a truly
English monarch once more ascended the throne,
the reign of Queen Anne appears the only exception
to a foreign dominion.' The foreign birth and
feelings of the first two Georges presented themselves
to the mind of the greatest of English satirists of the
present age in a somewhat different point of view.
' It was lucky for us,' says Mr. Thackeray, ' that our
first Georges were not more high-minded men ; espe
cially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as
H H

466 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
to leave England to have her own way. Our chief
troubles began when we got a king who gloried
in the name of Briton, and being born in the
country, proposed to rule it. He was no more fit to
govern England than his grandfather and great
grandfather, who did not try. It was righting
itself during their occupation. The dangerous, noble
old spirit of Cavalier loyalty was dying out ; the
stately old English High Church was emptying
itself ; the questions dropping which, on one side and
the other — ^the side of loyalty, prerogative. Church
and King : the side of right, truth, civil and religious
freedom — had set generations of brave men in arms.
By the time when George the Third came to the
throne the combat between loyalty and liberty was
eome to an end, and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and
chUdless, was dying in Italy.' There is much truth
in both these views of the position, though I can
hardly acquiesce unreservedly in either. It by no
means foUows that had the House of Stuart escaped
its first exile, the English character of the Monarchy
would have been secured in anything but the mere
name. Charles the Second, in accordance with his
father's marriage-articles, would have been placed
for education at an early age in the hands of his
French mother and her foreign priests and French
ified counseUors at Court; the influence of France,
not only of her policy, but of her social habits and
national stamp, would have shaped the future not

GEORGE THE FIRST. 467
only of the King, but of the people of England, and
a divergence of sentiment between the two would
have been avoided, not by the King being more
EngUsh, but by the nation becoming more French.
From this, at any rate, with its probable consequences,
the 'Great EebeUion' saved us ; and whUe the nation
alism of the dynasty was suspended for a century,
the continuity of English feelings in the nation re
mained unbroken. On the other hand, it can only
be looked upon as a poor consolation that a civil
conflict between King and People was avoided during
the reigns of the two flrst princes of the House of
Hanover only by the absence of a common interest.
But whatever may be our judgment as to the
national gain or loss involved in the accession of the
House of Hanover, there can be no doubt as to the
very trying and in-vidious position which that family
was called upon to occupy in ascending the Throne
of England.
To begin with, its connection with the dynasty
which it succeeded was too remote to exercise any
perceptible influence on the sympathies of the nation.
The associations in the English popular mind which
had, in the early part of the seventeenth century,
gathered round the name and cause of the beautiful
Queen of Bohemia — the representative of the Pro
testant cause on the Continent of Europe — had been
much weakened by the more recent memories of her
younger sons Eupert and Maurice; nor had the
E H 2

468 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
conduct of their elder brother Charles been such as to
remove the prejudice thus engendered. The English
men of the early part of the eighteenth century were
called upon to renew, if they could, these faded im
pressions of an old attachment in favour of the son
of the youngest sister of these Princes of the CivU
War period, a man of flfty-four years of age, who had
pot visited England since the reign of Charles the
Second ; whose father, whose education, whose asso
ciates, and whose habits were all German, who could
not speak English, and who, if he understood any
thing of English politics was entirely ignorant of
English feeUngs and modes of thought. Nor was
there anything in his previous career, as there was in
that of William the Third, to command the admi
ration of Englishmen, in default of their affections.
He had been merely known as a petty electoral
prince, whose only public appearances, in the Euro
pean contest against Louis the Fourteenth, had
indicated his courage and sense of honour rather
than his capacity. WiUiam — if a foreigner and un
popular himself — had at his side a devoted wife, who
was both English and popular, and who seemed to
continue rather than to break the dynastic associ
ations of Englishmen. But Sophia of Hanover, the
mother of George the First, was almost as completely
a foreigner in habits and feelings as himself; and if
she had achieved a European reputation as a highly
accomplished woman, and a liberal and wise patron

GEORGE THE FIEST. 469
of learned men, seemed from her advanced age a
relic of the past rather than a hope of the future.
Nor, whUe herself both a statesman and a scholar,
did she take common pains to give her son a decent
education. In short, George the First landed in this
country as its recognised King, deficient in almost
every qualification which could recommend him
prospectively to the sympathies of his new subjects.
Nor were his own prepossessions with respect to them
more favourable. His only personal experiences of
England had been gathered during the most profli
gate and corrupt period of English history, and his
more mature impressions of English principles and
honour had been drawn from his experiences of such
men as ChurchUl and Harley. Can it be wondered
at that George of Hanover received the news of his
accession to the English Crown without any mani
festation of pleasure, and showed little alacrity in
seeking the shores of a country of whose inhabitants
he had so indifferent an opinion, and which, he had
reason to believe, welcomed him only as 9, necessary
pis-aller, and from a cold calculation of its own
interest alone, without the smaUest consideration for
his personal predilections ? This relative position of
King and People at the accession of the House of
Hanover must be borne in mind, if we would judge
fairly of the conduct of both during the years that
foUowed. But for this, on the one hand, the King
might appear to be inexcusably wrapt up in his own

470 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
personal preferences for Hanover, and ungratefully.
blind to his responsibilities as King of England ; and,
on the other hand, the English nation might be
justly subject to a charge of indifference to their own
cause and failure of duty to one who had assumed
his difficult position only at their express call. As
it was, neither King nor People can escape from just
blame for their respective conduct, but this conduct
is explained, and the blame to some degree lightened
by the complete want of mutual sympathy. The
character, indeed, of George would have been a very
exceptional one, and he would have been peculiarly
happy in the qualities of his mind, if he had over
come the inherent difficulties of his position, and
obtained the hearts instead of merely the sufferance
of his English subjects. But such was not the case.
George Louis, Elector of Hanover, or (more cor
rectly) of Brunswick and Liineburg, was the repre
sentative of a branch of the Guelph family, which
had already blended with the royal blood of England
by the marriage of Henry the Lion with Matilda,
daughter of Henry the Second of England. So far
as blood, therefore, was concerned, he represented on
his father's as well as on his mother's side both the
Norman and Saxon royal families of this country.
He was bom at Hanover on the 28th of May, 1660 —
the day before Charles the Second made his triumphal
entry into London at the Eestoration — significant
dates in the history of the fortunes of the elder line

GEOEGE THE FIRST. 471
of the House of Stuart. His subsequent visit to
England is said to have been connected with some
project for marrying him to the Princess Anne, whose
successor he was destined to become, instead of her
husband. He was actually married to his cousin
Sophia Dorothea of Zell, a match, it would seem, in
which the inclinations of both bridegroom and bride
were sacrificed to considerations of family policy.
Sophia Dorothea appears to have been a volatile,
excitable woman, of small principle and strong
passions. These she indulged, there can be little
reasonable doubt, criminally with an early favourite,
the unprincipled adventurer. Count PhUip von
Konigsmarck, whose elder brother had become
notorious in England for the murder of Mr. Thynne.
The intrigue was detected — through the jealousy of
a mistress of Konigsmarck — by the Elector Ernest
Augustus, father of George, during his son's absence
from Hanover; and the assassination of Konigsmarck,
and the imprisonment of Sophia Dorothea which
followed, were the acts of the old Elector alone,
though the restraint to which his wife was subjected
was continued by George after his accession to the
Electorate. His wife's flighty and violent disposition
had long disgusted him with her, and he had no
sentiment in him to mitigate his sense of justice.
There appear to have been at least two types of
character in the House of Brunswick — both strongly
marked, and alternating in the members of the

472 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
famUy. The one was a gay, jovial, somewhat bois
terous, but affable and genial temperament, much
liked, but little respected and little tmstworthy.
To this type the father of George approximated.
Had he, instead of his son, been the Parliamentary
heir to the English Crown, he would probably have
misgoverned England not a little, and been a reckless
waster of her wealth, but inflnitely more popular than
either of the first two Georges. The other type was
that of a quiet, precise, frugal, and homely disposi
tion, with a strong sense of duty, a strict regard for
truth, and a tendency to the insufferable martinet.
To this latter type the character of George the First
was assimilated. Self-wUl was the salient point of
the former type — obstinacy of the latter. Thought
less injustice was the besetting faUing of the one,
— cold and rigid justice carried to the verge (if not
beyond) of brutality the accompaniment of the other.
The less the truth was known about the one the more
it was liked ; the less the other was really known the
more it was disliked. The one inspired incautious
sympathy, the other extorted unwilling respect.
George the First had a clear head, and even a strong
head within the range to which his mental capacity
limited his powers of observation and decision. He
was an extremely well-intentioned man within the
compass of his idea of his duty. He was an excellent
man of business also on the same scale and under the
same conditions. The same was true of his ideas of

GEOEGE THE FIEST. 473
justice and clemency ; there was no feeling of revenge
about the one or of generosity about the other. The
range of his understanding was very limited. His
mind was thoroughly unanalytical in its reasoning ;
he saw everything in its simple concrete form. He
was a true pre-Eaffaellite in the absence of atmo
sphere and visual proportion in the pictures which he
drew in his own mind of men and things ; he hated
such and such men and such and such things — he
strongly preferred such and such others. Their re
spective greatness or insigniflcance made no difference
in the intensity of his feelings. Habit had over such
a character immense influence. The unaccustomed
freshness of the English oysters afflicted him, perhaps,
quite as much as the unaccustomed forms of English
loyalty and disloyalty. His ways were those of a
man of habit, crystallised by a life of half a century.
Both the pecuUar virtues and peculiar vices of the
English people were strange to him and incompre
hensible. Yet he had no irritable desire to reform
them to his own esteemed pattern ; he felt it no part
of his duty to turn England into a Hanover. All
that he wanted to do was to perform such functions
of government as were considered essential to the
position of King of England, which he had under
taken ; and in other respects to see and know as little
of England and the English as possible, and get away
from England to Hanover whenever he could find a
legitimate excuse. He acquiesced in most of the

474 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
measures submitted to his approbation by the Wal-
poles and Townshends and Stanhopes, who, he
thought, had the most common sense and the best
apology for principle among English statesmen ; but
he did so in the spirit of one who sees no particular
harm in a suggestion made by others better acquain
ted with the subject-matter, rather than of one who
is sufficiently interested to give the matter much
thought. He initiated nothing himself except where
the interests or supposed interests of Hanover were
concerned. On that subject he had a strong opinion,
and was almost immovably obstinate in his adherence
to it. In other things he was an intelligent and
well-meaning roi faineant. His original choice of
the Whig statesmen had been based partly on his
knowledge of them, gained during the various nego
tiations while he was still in Hanover, partly on his
deep conviction that had it not been for the exertions
of them and of their party, he would still have been
merely Elector of Hanover. And little as he cared
for England in itself, he had a sense of property in
his succession to its Crown which equalled in ten
acity the most intense theory of right-divine. No
Norman and no Plantagenet could have kept a closer
grip (in reality) on the sceptre of England, and no
Anglo-Saxon could have displayed the strength of
immobility more clearly than the first two Georges.
This resolution not to be expelled, coupled oddly with
a strong desire to go, would probably have sustained

GEOEGE THE FIEST. 475
the first George on the throne, even had Mar and
Derwentwater's enterprises become much more for
midable than they did, as it alone kept the second
George on his throne when Charles Edward reached
Derby. The temperament of George the First, as I have
already intimated, was phlegmatic. His temper was
generally calm and equable, but his occasional fits of
passion were in proportion violent and ungovernable.
Without being naturally implacable, he required to
have a good reason given for forgiving any one, just
as he believed it impossible any one could have
become obnoxious to him without real provocation
received. One of his least reputable quarrels was
with his own son, George Augustus, Prince of Wales,
not very long after his own accession to the English
Cro-wn. The ostensible cause of the quarrel was
trivial enough ; probably the seeds of estrangement
had been sown for some time. Jealousy of the
comparative popularity of his son in England during
his Eegency for his father may have contributed to
the breach ; and possibly the recollection that he was
Sophia Dorothea's son, who was keen in defending
his mother's reputation, may have inspired distrust.
During the continuance of the quarrel the conduct of
neither father nor son was very seemly ; but at length,
in 1720, through the mediation of counseUors and
friends, the breach was at least outwardly healed ; aU
Ungland took the opportunity of getting drunk — ^for

476 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
joy ; and the officers of the two Courts, according to
one of the contemporary newspapers, publicly 'kissed,
embraced, and congratulated one another upon this
auspicious reconciliation.'
The features of King George were heavy and
rather uninteresting, but not unintelligent — the in
teUigence of a shrewd but narrow-minded cynic. He
had little dignity either in his person or bearing, and
his dislike of display and public ceremonial did much
to impair his popularity. He had been a kind,
considerate ruler in Hanover, and was much beloved
and respected by aU classes in that part of his do
minions ; but though he wished weU to the English
people, he neither understood nor liked them, and
sought refuge from them in the society of Germans of
a low social class and tastes. The proportion which
the grossness of the tastes and habits which George
brought with him from Hanover bore to that which
was sanctioned by the contemporary standard of
English society has probably been somewhat exag
gerated by writers of the present day. The society
was not very refined which produced and tolerated
the writings of Swift. The French varnish indeed
under which vice appeared in the reign of Charles
the Second had worn off, and they who were ac
customed to what was talked and done in England
in ' good society ' during the reigns of William and
Anne had Uttle pretence for lifting up their hands
^nd eyes at the grossness of George of Hanover and

GEOEGE THE FIEST. 477
his courtiers. But it is the characteristic of aU
social offenders to hate exaggerations of their own
offences, and the somewhat coarser daub presented
by the foreign artist offended the moral sestheticism
of the English fine-gentleman. The conventional
reticences and proprieties were not the same in the
two countries, and a transgression on such a point as
this was more keenly felt than the substantial de
linquency. George had the conventional morality as
well as the conventional ideas of good-breeding of
his own country. The Hanoverian Court version of
the commandments agreed pretty much with that
which had been long established in England, in
viewing with indulgence the sins of seduction and
adultery in its princes and great men; but then
George brought over to England two foreign mis
tresses, one of whom was uncomely in English eyes
for her height, and the other for her breadth, and
both of whom loved the English money of their royal
patron as if they had had a right to it as English
women. So both they and their patron were ridiculed
and hated and viUfied by the advocates of legitimate
English immorality. In truth, the conduct and
Courts of the first Georges may have fostered the
grossness of English society, but they certainly did
not originate it.
Some qualities at least George the First had which
recommend him to our respect as an EngUsh Sove
reign. He desired to do justice, he kept his word

473 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
sacredly, he had unquestionable physical courage,
and he was moraUy brave so far as his lights aUowed
him to see wherein moral courage lay. If his un
derstanding was limited and his education sadly
deficient, he had the sense to choose able and weU-
meaning counciUors, and wisdom enough to seek
their advice, and generaUy to act on it when given.
If he was but an indifferent Christian he was at any
rate an honest King,

479

GEOBGE THE SECOND.
If it was the fate of George the First to attach to his
person few,. if any, warm admirers among his EngUsh
subjects, it was the misfortune of his son and suc
cessor — George Augustus — to evoke an amount of
personal animosity which renders it difficult in the
present day to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion
respecting his character. That personal ill-feeling
and personal resentment have much to do with most
of the estimates of him which are preserved in the
memoir--writers of the period is evident, if only from
the fact that these accounts are so often self-in
consistent and incapable of being blended into an
harmonious whole. Nor is the character of any one
of the three chief authorities for the ordinary esti
mates of George the Second such as to induce us to
place much reUance on their unsupported statements,
or the judgments which they chose to pass upon
their contemporaries. AU three were shrewd men
of the world and clever delineators of men and man
ners, and as such possess a certain value as histori
cal witnesses ; but aU three were also men of strong

480 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
prejudices, and rather lax ideas as to the boundaries
of truth and falsehood. Horace Walpole is known to
everyone as the ideal of a thorough -paced, gossip,
with whom the goodness of a story is the first and
main point, and its truth a very secondary considera
tion, and who would never scruple for a moment to
colour or even invent where his prejudices prompted,
or the completeness of the story seemed to caU for
the addition.- The celebrated Lord Chesterfield, who
had been a star in the firmament of Leicester House
when George the Second was himself Prince of Wales
and the centre of an Opposition Court, and who again
for a time filled a simUar position in the Court of
Frederick, the succeeding Prince of Wales, has left
us a ' Character ' of his earlier patron which, on the
whole, is more candid than could have been expected,
though the animus of the writer peeps forth unmis
takably in some of the paragraphs. But Lord Hervey,
his contemporary and rival, warns us against placing
trust in Chesterfield, whom he describes as utterly
unscrupulous in his statements, and constantly sa
crificing truth to epigrammatic effect. As to Lord
Hervey himself, he has painted his own character in
unmistakable colours in his ' Memoirs of the Eeign
of George the Second ; ' and Mr. Thackeray expresses
in strong terms the horror with which this self-
portraiture filled his mind. We cannot be too much
on our guard against assuming as correct the cha
racters drawn by men so briUiant and so little

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 481
fettered by conscientious scruples as these were, and
it is better to be contented with the more trustworthy
hints of a much better man, though less pointed
-writer, Earl Waldegrave, and with tamer deductions
from established facts, than to give a false interest
to this sketch by adopting these clever but doubtful
representations. The present Lord Stanhope pronounces George
the Second to have been inferior to his father in
inteUect, but Lord Chesterfield's remark seems to
bring us nearer to the truth :— ' He had not better
parts than his father, but much stronger animal
spirits, which made him produce and communicate
himself more.' Neither father nor son can justly lay
claim to more than a very moderate amount of ability,
but the range of George the Second's mind was much
greater than his father's, and if he judged less soberly
and soundly in some respects than the phlegmatic
and precise George Louis did within his narrower
sphere of thought, he entertained much more readily
the possibility of outlying considerations beyond
the boundaries of his own personal experience, and
took an interest in a much greater number of things
in which other people than himself were interested.
But this very circumstance was disadvantageous to
George the Second in any public comparison between
his abUity and that of his father, for the wider the
area over which the sympathies of the former ex
tended, and the greater and the more diversified the
1 1

482 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
objects on which his intellectual abUities were exer
cised, the more apparent became the poorness of
those abilities, and the more salient any peculi
arities of manner and disposition. The greater re
serve of George the First also (however unpleasing
and unpopular in itself) had not been without its
effect in preventing the extent of his intellectual
incapacity from being gauged. A silent man has
always great advantages in this respect over a man
of familiar and more communicative temperament.
Not only does he not expose himself, but he is
credited with a positive amount of wisdom to which
he is really quite unentitled. But in George the
Second the nature of his father had been materially
modified by the irritable and impulsive temperament
of his mother. He resembled his father, indeed, in
his exceUent business habits, his methodical arrange
ment of his time, and in that subservience to the
force of habit which made Lord Hervey say of him
that ' he seemed to think his having done a thing
to-day an unanswerable reason for his doing it to
morrow.' Like his father, he was thoroughly right-
minded in his intentions with respect to both the
public and individuals. Lord Chesterfield admits
that 'his first natural movements were always on
the side of justice and truth,' though he avers ' they
were often warped by ministerial influence, or the
secret twitches of avarice.' The -former of these
limitations, of course, simply means that he some-

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 483
times followed the counsels of his constitutional
advisers instead of those of Lord Chesterfield. This
writer adds that George 'was generally reckoned
iU-natured, which indeed he was not. He had rather
an unfeeling than a bad heart ; but I never observed
any settled malevolence in him, though his sudden
passions, which were frequent, made him say things
which in cooler moments he would not have exe
cuted. His heart always seemed to me to be in a
state of perfect neutrality between hardness and
tenderness.' There was equal courage in both the
Georges, equal presence of mind in the face of great
dangers, and a similar natural steadiness and per
tinacity of purpose. But there were also marked*
differences between father and son. The mind of
George the First was habituaUy at rest, and his
passions usuaUy completely under his control ; the
mind of George the Second was always restless in a
greater or less degree, and his passions at the mercy
of every passing occurrence, however trivial. Though
he thought much more about great things than his
father, he was much more disturbed about little
matters. This, Lord Chesterfield asserts, he was
told by the King himself, and he confirms . it
by his own observation. 'I have often,' he says,
' seen him put so much out of humour at his private
levee by a mistake or blunder of a valet de chambre,
that the gaping crowd admitted to his public levee
Ii2

484 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
have, from his looks and silence, concluded that he
had just received some dreadful news.'
His avarice, which is often spoken of by contem
poraries, seems to have been due to the same cause.
He was naturally economical, and he felt with
disproportionate keenness aU the smaller demands
on his pocket, and especially resented any unusual
or extraordinary appeals to his bounty. He had no
idea of any additional claim upon his generosity, on
the ground of his royal position. He a^cted in the
spirit of a trustee whose accounts had to be audited
in chancery. Yet his love of saving never stood in
the way of what he himself believed to be a duty to
himself or the country; and to secure the success
of what he considered a true and necessary public
policy he was even reckless in his expenditure.
Under this very parsimonious sovereign the National
Debt was considerably more than doubled, and the
annual parliamentary grant rose from three and a
half miUions to nineteen. And this was nearly all
public expenditure. The King's pri-vate expenditure
was regulated by strict economy, and his mode of
li-ving was simple and frugal in the extreme. There
was much plundering, no doubt, by ministers and
courtiers, and a considerable sum was spent in
governing by corruption ; but the great increase
arose from the natural ambition and enterprise of
the King in his foreign policy. He was no doubt,
to some extent, influenced in this policy by his

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 485
interest in the fortunes and position of Hanover, his
love for which principality was scarcely, if at all,
inferior to that of his father. But his favourite
schemes embraced far wider considerations, and
tended to much more serious entanglement in the
general affairs of the Continent than were dema.nded
by his interests as Elector of Hanover alone. He
was always too much in earnest and too eager about
everything which he undertook to confine himself
within any such limits. It tasked aU the sagacity
and adroitness of Eobert Walpole . to impose his let-
alone, spend-at-home policy on the eager spirit of
his Eoyal master ; the more warUke and enterprising
spirit of Carteret always carried with it the King's
avowed or secret sympathies ; and notwithstanding a
great divergence in their estimate of the importance
of Hanoverian mterests, the daring policy of the
elder Pitt was much more in unison with the King's
o-wn bent of miad than the cautious, unenterprising
counsels of his earUer Minister. This enterprise, far
more physical than inteUectual in its character and
operation, made the courage also of George the
Second different in kind from that of his father.
That of George the First, though undoubted and
never-failing, was as unobtrusive as it was unheroic
in its mode of manifestation. But George the
Second, whose daring impetuosity on the battle-field
and energetic resolution on the approach of danger
might have seemed more akin to the heroic mould.

486 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
lost even the credit which he was entitled to on this
account by his unconcealed self-satisfaction at his
heroic qualities, and his naive appeals to all the
world for acknowledgment and admiration of the
same. His self-satisfaction was so genuine, and
really to some extent so well founded, that it is
rescued from the imputation of being mere bombast ;
but it derogated sadly from the dignity of the king
and the man, and even induced some persons to
entertain most unjust doubts as to the reality of his
courage itself. He was fond of talking of his own
acts of valour, and when in one of these fits of self-
admiration, his gait assumed a corresponding cha
racter, and he strutted in the most approved stage
fashion. The malicious wits of the day were not
slow in seizing on this piece of royal absurdity, to
which the insignificant person and features of the
King gave additional piquancy, and ' little George '
was sorely handled by them for this unheroic weak
ness. But in reality this excessive self-laudation and os
tentatious boasting were the index much less of abso
lute self-esteem than of habitual self-distrust. With
all his impulsive eagerness to throw himself into
situations which demanded the possession of much
higher intellectual qualities than his, there was an
unavowed but recurring sense of his own inferiority,
which made him all the more anxious to assert him
self on points on which he had some claims to public

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 487
admiration, and all the more delighted with himself
that he had such claims. Lord Chesterfield saw this
clearly enough, observing that 'he was thought to
have a great opinion of his own abiUties ; but, on the
contrary, I am very sure that he had a great distrust
of them in matters of State.' But although he had
the weakness to endeavour to conceal the extent to
which he actually relied on the opinion and was
governed by the advice of his wife and her adviser,
Eobert Walpole, he had the good sense generally to
follow that advice, and to cherish no ill-feeling either
towards wife or minister for being so much wiser
than himself. Though he had not abUity enough to
inaugurate and conduct a policy himself, he was clear
headed enough to appreciate it and adopt it when
recommended by others, if he could only be induced
to forego his first impulses, and really listen to ex
postulation. Lord Waldegrave testifies that, ' with
in the compass of my own observation, I have known
few persons of high rank who could bear contradiction
better, provided the intention was apparently good,
and the manner decent.' But he resented in the
most passionate manner any overt attempt to dictate
to him, and to ignore or lower his dignity and intel
lectual status in the eyes of the public. His wife,
who had greater power ovef him than any human
being, was compeUed, we are told, though he was
quite conscious of its existence and effects, to avoid
«every direct and open exercise of it, even in her most

488 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
private communications with him, and to prevaU by
graduaUy insinuating into his mind the counsels
which she wished him to foUow. This anxiety to
conceal from himSeU as well as from others the extent
to which he really was subject to her influence led to
the assumption towards her sometimes in public —
when he was in a bad humour or dissatisfied with his
own conduct — of an arrogant and contemptuous
manner, which did not in the smaUest degree re
present his real estimate of her, or any real want of
feeling towards her. Lord Hervey divined justly
that his roughness of bearing towards particular
individuals was by no means an index of a corre
sponding feeling of dislike, but often arose merely
from a transient fit of iU-humour. And, like many
extremely sensitive persons, he was very careless and
inconsiderate of the feeUngs of others, particularly
his wife's, for whom he had the greatest affection.
This is what Lord Hervey caUs his ' unfeeling heart '
and his ' neutrality between hardness and tenderness.'
But George really had strong and warm feelings, and
was as constant in his friendships as he was vehement
and tenacious in his antipathies. Lord Waldegrave
teUs us that ' to those servants who attend his person,
and do not disturb him with frequent soUcitations, he
is ever gracious and affable.'
But a point on which his character differed most de
cidedly from thatof his father's was his sentimentality.
This was not ' sentiment ' in the English sense of the

GEORGE THE SECOND. 489
word, for George the Second was prosaic and matter-
of-fact enough in the ordinary affairs of life to rob
him of aU pretensions to that quality in English eyes.
He thought poetry and romances very sad rubbish
and a thorough waste of time, and he had not the
faintest eye for the fine arts. History was his
favourite reading, and his preference for one painting
over another was based entirely on his greater
famiUarity with it as a piece of household furniture.
Yet he was sentimental, notwithstanding, and
romantic after a German fashion. He was a great
letter-writer, and whether to his mistresses or his
wife he poured forth on paper a minute chronicle of
all his doings, thoughts, fears, hopes, and feelings
generaUy, with aU the unreserve of a school-girl
correspondent. Then, when not engaged in actual
business, or in reviewing his darling soldiers, he
lounged away his time in the rooms of his wife, or
strolled about in the moonlight with his mistress,
talking and talking about himself and his feelings in
much the same maundering and wearisome fashion.
Such sentimentality was there in his amours, that it
was considered very doubtful by his contemporaries,
and is stUl undecided, whether his relation with the
Countess of Suffolk at any rate, went beyond this
dreary sentimental flirtation. Even with his other
and later mistress, Madame de Walmoden, whom he
created Countess of Yarmouth after the Queen's
death, and by whom he is understood to have had a

490 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
son, this somewhat sickly sentimental intercourse was
evidently the main charm. It is doubtful whether
George ever really felt any strong affection for any
one but his wife. But he liked female society, and
found in women the most congenial confldants. In
his choice of these favourites, too, he displayed much
better taste than his father. And although George's
monotony of habits made him, particularly as he
grew older, a somewhat tiresome companion, he was
naturally by no means duU or lifeless, but generally
cheerful, and even gay. ' In the drawing room,'
says Lord Waldegrave, ' he is gracious and poUte to
the ladies, and remarkably cheerful and familiar with
those who are handsome, or with the few of his old
acquaintance who were beauties in his younger days.
His conversation is very proper for a tete-a tete. He
then talks freely on most subjects, and very much to
the purpose ; but he cannot discourse with the same
ease, nor has he the faculty of laying aside the King
in larger company, not even in those parties of
pleasure which are composed of his most intimate
acquaintance.' Before his accession to the throne,
his Court at Leicester House was emphaticaUy what
is expressed in the word 'jolly.' The leading wits
and beauties of the day were there daUy assembled to
cap epigrams, and laugh at one another, and enjoy
themselves very thoroughly after the fashion of that
day. And in this circle the great attraction for
George himself was gay, saucy, witty Mary BeUenden,

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 491
with whom he sought to estabUsh the ambiguous
relation to which we have just referred, and who,
notwithstanding her refusal of his suit, alienated
his affection only by a clandestine marriage. The
Countess of Suffolk, though with no pretensions to
beauty, was a pleasing, a.miable woman, of no abUity,
but much good sense, who appears to have captivated
all about her by her sweet, gentle manners. She,
however, seems to have latterly lent herself to
poUtical intriguers, and to have annoyed the King by
opposing him frequently on his fixed opinions, and
the sentimental character of their intercourse thus
ceasing, George soon became heartily tired of her.
Madame de Walmoden was a handsome, briUiant
German countess. It was characteristic of Georsre
the Second that, though he conferred rank or
bestowed money upon his mistresses, he never
aUowed them to have any real political infiuence, and
resented their interference in State • affairs. These
he talked over with his wife alone, requiring to
Imow everything and to have a good reason for
everything, — full of objections and prejudices and
vehement resolutions, but in the end almost always
following her advice. A woman who could so manage
such a jealous, irritable, and emotional character as
to secure his entire confidence, and establish firmly
by his side so sagacious an adviser as Eobert Walpole,
must have possessed considerable abUities, though
she cannot pretend to the highest intellectual rank.

492 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
She had a clear head, great tact, and insight into
character, perfect self-knowledge, and perfect self-
command. What her inmost feeling towards her
husband may have been it is difficult to divine, but
the deepest affection could not have produced more
complete self-devotion to his interests and his per
son. He was always her primary consideration. She
watched over him with unsleeping and unwearying
solicitude, and she watched over the interests and
prosperity of England because his interests and hap
piness were therein involved. And with aU his oc
casional neglect and roughness towards her, George
fully appreciated her unselfish devotion. Nowhere
in history is there such a tribute by a royal husband
to the merits of his wife as that preserved by Lord
Hervey from the lips of the King himself. To this
devotion Caroline sacrificed the natural delicacy of a
woman and a wife. Unable to divert him from his
ambiguous pursuit of other women, she made her
self his confidant, and even in that strange depart
ment for a wife became his habitual ad-viser. It is
probable that the wit or malignity of the memoir-
writers has exaggerated the indecent grotesqueness
of this relation between husband and wife, but their
concurrent testimony seems to leave no doubt of the
fact itself. It must be observed that there was
perhaps not the usual conventional immorality in
this strange conduct, for it would appear that both
.George and his wife were freethinkers on matters of

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 493
reUgion— Theists, but nothing more — and, high as
has been the morality of many Theists, we do not
know what was the code of morals attached to the
particular form of Theism adopted by the King and
Queen. The other point on which the character of
Queen CaroUne faUs below the highest standard is
her assumption of the role of a learned lady, and a
critic on aU possible points of art, literature, philo
sophy, and theology. Her foible was to be thought
a sort of female ' Admirable Crichton,' and accord
ingly she turned her dressing-room into a scene
of the most bizarre character, in which bishops and
wits, royal chaplains and freethinkers, statesmen,
men of arts, and men of fashion were mixed up with
coiffeurs and waiting- women, and the latest epigram
hustled the church-service for the day. In the midst,
the Queen listened to elaborate compliments and
complimentary odes, or chattered glibly — she was a
great talker — or sat in judgment on a metaphysical
controversy involving the nature of all things and the
destinies of mankind. This was a weakness, but it
had its advantages in a national point of "view. It
fostered inteUectual tastes and pursuits, and it fiUed
the higher places in the Church with learned and
good men, instead of the usual tame recipients of
Ministerial patronage.
But devoted to each other and well-meaning as
were the royal husband and wife, there was a skeleton
in their house. This was their eldest son, Frederick,

494 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
whom his mother despised and disliked, yet half-pitied
and half-excused, but whom his father loathed as well
as despised without a mitigating feeling. The un
reserve and intensity of this feeling cannot be defended
in such a relation, but it was far from groundless.
Even by the confession of those who attached them
selves to his person, Frederick was as thoroughly
worthless as it is possible for a mere fool to be. With'
a few showy external accomplishments which deceived
nobody as to his real inteUectual capacity, his was
as flimsy a nature as can be conceived. False and
treacherous to every one, thoroughly mean and
cowardly in his disposition, and an habitual and
purposeless liar, he was injurious to himself more
than to anyone else, and except as the heir- apparent.
to the Crown, which he happily did not live to possess,
his life was thoroughly insignificant, and his death
produced no other effect but dismay to the little
coterie who had gathered round him as a centre of
cabal, and a sense of relief and deliverance in the
rest of the nation.
If Lord Hervey is to be believed, we owe a debt of
gratitude to Queen Caroline for modifying and con
trolling the views of George the Second on a point
of vital national importance. At his accession, ac
cording to this writer, George had the ambition of
reaUy reigning, of employing only second-rate men
as his ministers, and of keeping them in the position
of business clerks, whUe the reins of government

GEOEGE THE SECOND. 495
remained in his own hands. With such an irritable,
impetuous character as his, a government so personal
could scarcely have faUed to bring with it grave
constitutional differences with Parliament. But if
there is any truth in Lord Hervey's statement (and
Lord Waldegrave hints at the King's personal prefer
ence for a German autocracy), George (whether under
his wife's advice or not) soon learned the imprac
ticability of this project — probably felt his own in
capacity for the lofty part as soon as he was caUed
upon to act on his theory — and for the rest of his life
became what the courtier-writers thought slavishly
observant of the feelings of the House of Commons,
and was affected considerably (after his wife's early
death) in his estimate of advisers by the influence
which statesmen could obtain and retain in that as
sembly. But the choice which he actuaUy made is
probably attributable to his own good sense, rather
than to any theory of ParUamentary government.
The sagacity of his wife, confirmed by his own clear
practical perceptions, in the flrst instance recom
mended Walpole to his confldence ; and habit, and a
sense of gratitude for past services, joined to the dying
recommendation of the Queen, kept that Minister for
a long time in the same position. By that time,
George, who was never an uninformed or unintelligent
agent in the hands of his Minister, had learned
enough of men and manners, and the management of
both, to be tolerably able to act and choose for him-

496 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
self. He was not by nature a very clever or wise
man, but he had faUen into an exceUent course of
training, and he was an apt and careful pupU. His
prejudices, it is true, sometimes, as in the case of Pitt,
interfered with and postponed too long what was for
the real interests of England; but he was never
hopelessly deaf to reason, and when he was once
convinced of his duty, he fulflUed it with manful
resignation. On the whole, whUe it is impossible to look upon
George the Second as a superior man or a great
king, and though we must sometimes smUe at his
absurdities, we cannot in justice deny to him the
character of an earnest, well-meaning, intelligent
man, and of an honest, though not a very dignifled
sovereign.

497

GEOBGE THE THIBD.
In speaking of the conduct of George the -Third as a
King we must not forget that we are speaking of one
in whom there was not only the predisposition to
insanity, but that disease had exhibited itself in an
open attack before he had been five years on the
English Throne, and during the remainder of whose
reign there were at intervals of time three more
ascertained attacks of a similar kind — in one case a
very prolonged one — before that which in the year
1810 finaUy disabled him for aU rational intercourse.
It is therefore impossible to estimate his moral
responsibility even during the periods when he was
for all practical purposes seemingly quite sane, as
we should that of one whose mind was not thus ever
Subject to these mental derangements. And in
George the Third there are several characteristics
which appear to be closely connected with this dis
eased state of mind. Taking this consideration into
due account, his character seems to be tolerably
clear and consistent from the beginning to the end
of his public career. Lord Waldegrave, who was his
K K

498 ESTIMATES OP THE ENGLISH KINGS.
' Governor ' for a short time whUe he was Prince of
Wales, and who has given his impressions of him
two years before he ascended the throne, seems to
strike the keynote to the whole subsequent man.
' His parts,' he says, ' though not excellent, wiU be
found very tolerable, if ever they are properly exer
cised. He is strictly honest, but wants that frank
and open behaviour which makes honesty appear
amiable. When he had a very scanty allowance, it
was one of his favourite maxims that men should be
just before they are generous; his income is now
very considerably augmented, but his generosity has
not increased in equal proportion. His religion is
free from all hypocrisy, but is not of the most
charitable sort ; he has rather too much attention to
the sins of his neighbour. He has spirit, but not of
the active kind ; and does not want resolution, but it
is mixed with too much obstinacy. He has great
command of his passions, and wUl seldom do wrong
except when he mistakes wrong for right; but as
often as this shaU happen, it wUl be difficult to
undeceive him, because he is uncommonly indolent,
and has strong prejudices. His want of application
and aversion to business would be far less dangerous,
was he eager in the pursuit of pleasure; for the
transition from pleasure to business is both shorter
and easier than from a state of total inaction. He
has a kind of unhappiness in his temper, which if it
be not conquered before it has taken too. deep a root.

GEORGE THE THIED. 499
wUl be a source of frequent anxiety. Whenever he
is displeased, his anger does not break out into heat
and violence ; but he becomes snUen and silent, and
retires to his closet : not to compose his mind by
study or contemplation, but merely to indulge the
melancholy enjoyment of his own ill-humour. Even
when the fit is ended, unfavourable symptons very
frequently return, which indicate that on certain
occasions His Eoyal Highness has too correct a
memory. Though I have mentioned his good and
bad qualities without flattery and without aggrava
tion, aUowances should stiU be made on account of
his youth and his bad education ; for though the
Bishop of Peterborough [Dr. John Thomas], now
Bishop of Salisbury, the preceptor, Mr. Stone, sub-
governor, and Mr. Scott the sub-preceptor, were men
of sense, men of learning, and worthy, good men,
they had but little weight and influence. The
mother and the nursery always prevailed. During
the course of the last year, there has indeed been
some alteration; the authority of the nursery has
gradually declined, and the Earl of Bute, by the
assistance of the mother, has now the entire confi
dence. But whether this change wUl be greatly to
his Eoyal Highness's advantage is a nice question,
which cannot hitherto be determined with any cer
tainty.' The forebodings of Lord Waldegrave were only
too soon verified, for, next to his mother, Lord Bute
K E 2

500 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
proved the most mischievous adviser of the Prince.
To one placed in the situation in which young
George WUliam found himself on the premature
death of his father, the guidance and influence of his
mother must have been of the greatest importance.
The Princess of Wales — ^Augusta of Saxe-Gotha —
does not appear to have made any distinct impression
on the minds of her contemporaries till after the
death of her husband. For a short time after that
event her conduct created a general impression of
good sense and good feeling. She broke up the
little Anti-Court which had gathered round Frede
rick, and seemed to wish to place herself in every
respect at the disposal of the King and in accord
with his wishes ; and George the Second appreciating
this beha-viour treated her with marked kindness and
deference to her wishes. But no sooner did the
question of her son's marriage arise, than the Prin
cess dropped the mask, and began to show what her
real character was. She was determined that she
herself and her favourites alone should rule the future
King, and as a first and essential step to this domi
nation she. resolved that the choice of his wife should
be hers and not the King's, and that the future
partner of her son should be one from whose intellect
she need fear no rival in the sway over his mind.
The old King unluckily gave her a pretext for
opposing his choice by endeavouring to make a
match for his grandson with another member of the

GEOEGE THE THIED. 501
House of Brunswick, a very charming and accom
pUshed young Princess who fairly captivated old
George himself Had this match been accomplished,
the new Court of England would have borne a very
different aspect from what it afterwards assumed
under the auspices of Queen Charlotte. But the
Princess of Wales prevented this, and from that
time, with occasional intervals of suspended hostility,
there was a revival of the old antagonism of Leicester
House to St. James'. In herself, Augusta of Wales
— though a mere child, and a very childish chUd
when she became the wife of Frederick, for she
brought her great doll with her, to the astonishment
and amusement of the courtiers — was a complete
embodiment of the narrowest autocratic ideas aud
prejudices of a very self-important little German
Court. With the most absolute ideas of the position
and rights of a sovereign prince she combined an
overbearing disposition, much selfishness, a sagacity
which did not rise above the grade of cunning, and
a cold heart. She had just talent enough to tyrannise
over her own chUdren when young, and to render
their home a far from happy one, but neither the
abUity nor the tact to maintain her authority when
their relative positions became changed. She had
formed the lowest estimate of her son George's
abilities, and endeavoured to bring him up in the
homeliest and least intelligent manner, that she aqd
her favourite, Bute, might all the more easily and

502 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS,
thoroughly rule in his name, whilst implanting in
his mind the highest ideas of the dignity and irre
sponsibility of a King, In this she made a great
mistake. Young George, indeed, readily formed the
habit of domestic pursuits and homely living thus
recommended to him, and from the indolence of mind
of which Lord Waldegrave speaks, exhibited no de
sire to think and act for himself as long as the
sweets of supreme power remained untasted by him ;
he also received into his mind with equal readiness
the autocratic lessons of his mother and Bute ; but
he did so in a spirit that they little anticipated.
They had taught him that he ought to reign himself,
and not be, as his grandfather and great-grandfather
had been, the mere serfs of Parliament, and those
great famUies who ruled in Parliament; but they
really meant by this that he was so to reign as their
puppet, while he only looked upon them as necessary
and convenient teachers in the first steps towards his
personal government. With the possession of the
title of King his ambition awoke, and as Lord
Waldegrave had presaged, with it his indolence
disappeared, and he soon began to think and act for
himself. He always paid a marked filial respect and
deference to his mother, which she rigidly exacted,
and with which she was soon obliged to be content,
— and naturally he at first looked to Bute as his
counsellor and premier. But he soon found out that
the favourite was unequal to carrying out the lessons

GEOEGE THE THIED. 503
he had taught, and both Bute and the Princess
graduaUy disappeared from the political arena,
though their names long survived their actual
influence as popular bugbears. George then and
thenceforth acted for himself, and England was
astonished to find itself again exposed to what it
had imagined was banished with the exiled line of
Princes, — the personal rule of the King.
Nor was George without some qualifications for
the task he had undertaken, — that of making the
Throne instead of the Treasury Bench, or the House
of Commons, the pivot of government. He had all
the courage, resolution, and pertinacity of his family.
and the enterprise of his grandfather, without the
checks of his self-distrust and good sense. His own
prudence and sagacity, though similar in kind, were
greater than his mother's. Thus, he spoke and acted
as if nothing should induce him to forego a resolu
tion he had once avowed, and as long as it was
possible to produce any effect on the minds of his
Ministers or the nation by a belief in the inflexibility
of his resolution, he seemed as bent on persevering
as any Stuart King had ever been. When a change
of ministry and the admission of those whose prin
ciples were essentially opposed to his autocratic ideas
seemed almost inevitable, he wrote in such terms
as the foUowing : — ' Honestly, I would rather lose
the crown I_ now wear, than bear the ignominy of
pessessing it under their shackles ; ' and again, ' I

504 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
am still ready to accept any part of them that will
come to the assistance of my present efficient
Ministers ; but whUst any ten men in the kingdom
wiU stand by me, I wUl not give myself up to bond
age. My dear lord, I wiU rather risk my crown than
do what I think personally disgraceful. It is im
possible this nation should not stand by me. If
they wiU not, they shall have another King, for I
never wiU put my hand to what wUl make me
miserable to the last hour of my life ; ' and once
more, ' Eather than be shackled by those desperate
men (if the nation wUl not stand by me), I wUl
rather see any form of Government introduced into
this island, and lose my crown, rather than bear it
as a disgrace.' But when he found that aU this
high-toned bluster did not answer its purpose,
George suUenly submitted, in time to avoid any
such crisis as that which he so magnanimously
professed to be -wiUing to encounter, showing his
resentment plainly enough in his manner, but
changing his mode of action to one less personally
hazardous. On some of these occasions he talked of
going away to Hanover, as a sure means of bringing
the nation to its senses ; but a confldential adviser
suggesting that it might not be so easy, in that case,
for him ever to return to England again, no more
was heard of this tentative abdication. In fact,
George the Third was really far too shrewd a man
to lose an assured position to avoid any transient

GEOEGE THE THIED. 505
humUiation. If he could persuade the EngUsh
world that his threats would be carried out, and so
induce them to give way to his wishes, so much the
better ; but if they refused to believe in or be moved
by this demonstration, George quietly covered his
defeat by making their success as unpleasant as
possible to the victors.
This brings us to another phase in the character
of George the Third. We have seen that Lord
Waldegrave speaks of his want of frankness. It is
probable that the brooding temperament and indirect
ness of conduct which are among the least pleasing
of George's characteristics were closely connected
with the mental disease to which he had a constant
tendency. Secretiveness and cunning are usually
marked features in an organisation so affected, and
the suspiciousness of others and the strong and
irrational likes and dislikes which are main operating
causes in such a nature produce as a necessary result
dissimulation and crafty underhand intrigue. When
George, then, found that his violent declarations and
over-bearing wilfulness produced no effect, he re
strained his morbid impatience (although his reason
on several occasions tottered and even temporarily
succumbed under the effort), and endeavoured to
attain his ends by cunning watchfulness of oppor
tunities. He acquiesced outwardly in the change of
advisers and abandonment of cherished policy, and
then set to work to undermine the position of the

506 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
intrusive counseUors, .and to thwart as much as he
could venture to do the development of their plans.
He intrigued, in fact, against the Ministers he could
not meet openly, and waited for the moment when
he could safely dismiss them again with ignominy.
Hence arose the political phenomenon which went
under the name of ' The King's Friends ' — a set of
men who formed a backstairs Anti-Cabinet, the object
of which was to employ the King's name and the in
fluence of his personal sentiments in organising an
Opposition to his ostensible Cabinet advisers, both
in Parliament and in the country at large. It must
not be supposed by this that there was any regularly
constituted ' cabal,' or any precisely defined plans
of operation for its guidance ; but there were nearly
always, throughout the reign of George the Third,
two or three men — generally not men of high abUity,
but busy, gossiping intriguers who were irresponsible,
and both unavowed and often disavowed agents in
making known what the King's real -wishes were.
With the assistance of such men, and by a careful
observation of the variations in the pubUc sentiment,
George achieved a success in his plans of personal
government which, if we remember the relative
position of the Crown and Parliament at the com
mencement of his reign, seems at first marvellous.
In the course of this protracted struggle, the King
had to undergo many mortifications and not a few
seemingly fatal checks ; but he always bent to the

GEOEGE THE THIED. 507
storm in time, and generally knew when and how
long to maintain an infiexible position. Nothing
but this superior cunning and adroitness could have
saved him from a great civU convulsion such as that
which destroyed his predecessors in this path of royal
aggrandisement, Charles the First and James the
Second. But George the Third had concentrative-
ness of action as well as persistence of purpose ;
and however tortuous his paths were at times, the
tone and direction of his policy were always consis
tent, and no one had ever cause to suspect him for
a moment of having become a convert to Whig con
stitutional notions, although he might tolerate for
a time Whig Ministers, and even (as in the case of
his concessions to the revolted American Colonies
and his ultimate acknowledgment of their inde
pendence) adopt Whig measures and Whig policy.
This persistent uniformity of sentiment, suspended in
action from time to time by the necessities of his
position, but always reappearing again to the public
eye, produced by degrees a great and lasting effect on
the public mind. The very fact of the unity and
permanent position of Kingship as compared with
the shifting constituents of a House of Commons, and
the diversity of personal interests in the House of
Lords, was a formidable instrument when joined to
a distinctly perceived and unwavering unity of sen
timent and purpose. Against it the power of the
great Whig Houses had in reality little basis of

508 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
stability. Their ' connection ' had become too large
for the requirements of Ministerial patronage. They
could have furnished two or three entire Cabinets
out of their ranks, and supernumerary placeholders
to any extent. So there were always disappointed
men and jealous expectants, and George had little
difficulty in using one element against another, untU
aU cohesion and all solidity in their infiuence were at
an end. He turned against the Whig statesmen the
influence of the Crown — both legitimate and corrupt
— which they had 'So long availed themselves of for
their own individual or party purposes, and which
they had come to regard as quite as much their own
property as their family and pocket boroughs. The
old Duke of Newcastle beheld with astonishment
and dismay his long cherished Government boroughs
turned into agents for his own overthrow. The Whig
famUies thus paid the penalty of having converted
the natural organ of popular feeling into a mere
department of Ministerial patronage. Without con
sciously abandoning the popular principles which
had enabled them to withstand and overthrow the
tyranny of the House of Stuart, they had fallen
under the influence of long tenure of office, and had
nearly forgotten their origin and the real conditions
of their existence as a Party. Like the narrow and
select civic representation into which the Spanish
Cortes had degenerated when its privUeges were
successfully assailed by Charles the Fifth and Philip

GEOEGE THE THIED. 509
the Second, the EngUsh House of Commons had lost
its popular basis, and could evoke no popular
enthusiasm in its contest with the Crown. The
House of Lords, distracted by rival factions, soon
also succumbed to the liberal exercise of royal favour
and the dread of royal displeasure. Not only were
Lord-Lientenants of Counties dismissed from their
office for voting against the King's wishes, but
officers of the Army and Navy were deprived of their
commissions for a simUar offence.
The King himself was a most diligent man of
business. No permanent Secretary ever knew more
^-few half so much — of the minutiae of official life
and of the personnel of the civil and other services.
George the Third worked as hard as a Government
clerk is supposed to work, and his interest in such
bureaucratic details corresponds well with the type
of his inteUect. With two or three fixed ideas, or
rather prejudices, held and pursued with the intensity
of monomania, he had neither the capacity nor the
inclination to form any wide or elevated views. His
education had been grossly neglected, or rather he
had been aUowed or encouraged to neglect it, and his
mind, sharp and retentive, but narrow and essentially
unphUosophical, contented itself within a sphere as
limited as it was weU explored. His idea of personal
government was that of not being thwarted in his
own wishes, and of knowing and sanctioning every
thing that was done. A great policy either at home

510 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
or abroad had no meaning for him, and presented
itself, if at all, only in a negative shape. He was a
strict Protestant Church of England man, and no do
mestic policy must encourage or seem to encourage
Eoman Catholicism. He had severe ideas of discipline
and legal and official authority, and nothing must be
done to unduly relax the one or to weaken the other.
He had a horror of popular politics and popular
interference in government, except in support of the
rights and under the leadership of the Crown. He
Avas fond of the lower orders in their proper place ;
he loved to mix famUiarly with them, in the spirit of
paternal condescension in which a German potentate
chats with a peasant ; but he resented all independent
action or thought on their part as subversive of
authority and government. He wished them to be
paid and fed according to their condition, and
educated in a manner appropriate to the state of
life ' unto which it had pleased God to call them.'
He had a sincere and strong desire for the happiness
of his people and the welfare of the nation ; but it
was essential that there should be a general spirit of
subordination, the proper and necessary amount of
taxes duly paid, and the fuU number of persons, young
and old, as determined by the fixed processes of
justice, whipped, imprisoned, or hung every year, if
government was to be carried on at aU. AU ideas
beyond these were sedition and anarchy. After the
assistance given to the American colonists by France,

urj!iUi«jE TilE THIED. 511
his foreign policy consisted in little but a blind hatred
of that nation and of aU ' French ideas.' During two
periods of his life, George the Third had the oppor
tunity of putting these ideas of order and justice into
practical operation. In 1770 he found in Lord North
a pUant, though not always a sympathising, agent of
his views, and every one knows how disastrous was
the personal administration of that period ; how the
low-minded demagogue WUkes bearded King and
Parliament, and how the acrimonious sententiousness
of Junius ' engrossed public attention ; how incapable
was the administration at home, and how disastrous
the events abroad which robbed us of an empire. A
second time George the Third had the opportunity of
showing England the benefits of personal government,
and under singularly favourable circumstances. At his
side stood a man of real abUity and thoughtful mind,
personaUy infiexibly honest, disinterestedly desirous
of promoting the wishes of the King as weU as the
prosperity of the nation, and with a singular mastery
alike of business and men. In the younger Pitt no
doubt George the Third expected to meet with a
second pliant tool, like the easy-tempered North ; but
he met with a mind which, though compliant on
many points with the royal prejudices, to the injury
of his lasting reputation as a statesman, had
naturaUy as stiff and proud a nature as his own, and
was as Uttle satisfied with the name without the
reality of power. The King could not venture to

512 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
order about such a man in the insolent manner in
which he had treated George GrenviUe ; and he was
wise enough to perceive this. The result was a
tacit compromise by which the King for many years
always consulted Mr. Pitt, was much infiuenced by
his views, and left him a considerable share of
administrative power and influence; but by which
Mr. Pitt on his side gave up aU idea of a really great
domestic and foreign policy, in deference to the King's
rooted prejudices. The French Eevolution greatly
assisted King and Minister in holding their own
against all opponents, — by annihUating the Whig
party, and driving the terrified nation into a fanatic
admiration of the personal government of the
Sovereign. Every needful reform was refused or
postponed indefinitely, and people were educated into
a state of public abuses and general jobbery and
corruption as the normal condition of life. It has
tasked all the ability and energies of the statesmen
of William the Fourth and Victoria to remedy the
effects of this long mal-administration.
Towards the end of the first French war, George
became tired of even the limited check which the
talents and established public ascendancy of Pitt
placed on his own autocracy ; he became jealous as
well as tired of this higher intellectual companionship,
and began once more to intrigue against his Minister
with a new set of 'King's Friends.' A difference
between himself and Pitt on the subject of Catholic

GEORGE THE THIRD. 513
Emancipation, as a necessary sequel to the Act of
Union with Ireland, was the occasion of his o-ivino-
vent to an outburst of dogmatic self-assertion which
produced a recurrence of his terrible disease ; Pitt
resigned; Addington, the 'King's Friend,' became
Minister ; but when Pitt again returned to power,
the question of Catholic Emancipation was not again
mooted by him, the weU-known dangerous state of
the King's mind thus enabling the latter to carry his
point and to endanger the safety of the Empire
without further resistance.
But if the absolutist notions which the King's
mother had instilled into his mind exposed both
England and himself to great danger, and inflicted
nearly irreparable injury on the former — the home-
lOving and homely habits which that princess had
also cultivated in him produced a great accession
to his personal popularity, and constituted no small
ingredient in his political power. As an affectionate
husband to a plain, dull, narrow-minded woman —
whose naturally kind feelings had been stiffened into
something like insensibUity by the formalities of
Court ceremonial — and as the father of a large and
stately family, George the Third appealed to one of
the marked characteristics of English middle-class
sentiment, and commanded universal sympathy and
regard as exhibiting a pattern of English domestic
life. His Ul-judged partialities and severities with
his children were not at the time fully known, or if
L Ii

514 ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
SO, not estimated at their due importance, and the
public delighted in seeing him the centre figure of a
striking family group on the terraces of Windsor, and
in listening to stories of his affability to his subjects
of all classes in his country walks ; while they smiled
with kindly indulgence, and a certain satisfaction at
his stammering, ' What ! what ! what ! ' and other
oddities of speech, and at the ncCive and grotesque
ignorance of the stock-knowledge of ordinary life
which he displayed on such occasions. The pupil of
Bute was no longer remembered as such in those
days, and the portrait which has descended to us
from the last generation is not that of the astute
plotter for irresponsible authority, but of the ' good
old King.'
So far as his narrowness of judgment and prejudices
permitted, George was a just and a kind man ; he
was a religious man, too, as far as the general in
tention to do right and a regular observance of the
religious forms prescribed by a Church entitle any
one to that character. He had good abilities, chiefly
of the administrative order, and some power of
penetration into the dispositions, and especially the
weaknesses, of those around him; but he generally
dreaded and seldom understood the higher class of
genius. He was too apt to nourish a supposed injury,
and his memory was too good for him easily to
exercise the virtue of Christian forgiveness. But he
was not implacable, and his resentment was generally

GEORGE THE THIED. 515
sullen and passive, rather than aggressive ; and if he
forgot old services too soon when his wishes were
at length thwarted, he soon became reconciled to
individuals when he thought he saw in them real
marks of devotion to his person . Personal government,
indeed, was the bane of his reign, and an overweening
idea of his own paramount importance and competency
lay at the root of aU his errors. Disease probably
rendered this characteristic more masterful, but
disease also perhaps quickened his inteUectual
faculties, and made him more than a match for men
of actually far higher inteUectual capacities. If we
assign his duplicity to the influence of disease, we
may, on the whole, pronounce him to have been a
good man ; but it is impossible not to regard him, as
far as statesmanship is concerned, as one of the most
inefficient and unfortunate of our rulers.

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