shoulders was permanently higher than the other.
“I suppose,” said Christina, “that I could be straightened if I would let the surgeons attend to it; but it isn’t worth while to take the trouble.”
When Christina was four, Sweden became involved in the great war that had been raging for a dozen years between the Protestant and the Catholic states of Germany. Gradually the neighboring powers had been drawn into the struggle, either to serve their own ends or to support the faith to which they adhered. Gustavus Adolphus took up the sword with mixed motives, for he was full of enthusiasm for the imperiled cause of the Reformation, and at the same time he deemed it a favorable opportunity to assert his control over the shores of the Baltic.
The warrior king summoned his army and prepared to invade Germany. Before departing he took his little daughter by the hand and led her among the assembled nobles and councilors of state. To them he intrusted the princess, making them kneel and vow that they would regard her as his heir, and, if aught should happen to him, as his successor. Amid the clashing of swords and the clang of armor this vow was taken, and the king went forth to war.
He met the ablest generals of his enemies, and the fortunes of battle swayed hither and thither; but the climax came when his soldiers encountered those of Wallenstein–that strange, overbearing, arrogant, mysterious creature whom many regarded with a sort of awe. The clash came at Lutzen, in Saxony. The Swedish king fought long and hard, and so did his mighty opponent; but at last, in the very midst of a tremendous onset that swept all before him, Gustavus received a mortal wound and died, even while Wallenstein was fleeing from the field of battle.
The battle of Lutzen made Christina Queen of Sweden at the age of six. Of course, she could not yet be crowned, but a council of able ministers continued the policy of the late king and taught the young queen her first lessons in statecraft. Her intellect soon showed itself as more than that of a child. She understood all that was taking place, and all that was planned and arranged. Her tact was unusual. Her discretion was admired by every one; and after a while she had the advice and training of the great Swedish chancellor, Oxenstierna, whose wisdom she shared to a remarkable degree.
Before she was sixteen she had so approved herself to her counselors, and especially to the people at large, that there was a wide-spread clamor that she should take the throne and govern in her own person. To this she gave no heed, but said:
“I am not yet ready.”
All this time she bore herself like a king. There was nothing distinctly feminine about her. She took but slight interest in her appearance. She wore sword and armor in the presence of her troops, and often she dressed entirely in men’s clothes. She would take long, lonely gallops through the forests, brooding over problems of state and feeling no fatigue or fear. And indeed why should she fear, who was beloved by all her subjects?
When her eighteenth year arrived, the demand for her coronation was impossible to resist. All Sweden wished to see a ruling queen, who might marry and have children to succeed her through the royal line of her great father. Christina consented to be crowned, but she absolutely refused all thought of marriage. She had more suitors from all parts of Europe than even Elizabeth of England; but, unlike Elizabeth, she did not dally with them, give them false hopes, or use them for the political advantage of her kingdom.
At that time Sweden was stronger than England, and was so situated as to be independent of alliances. So Christina said, in her harsh, peremptory voice:
“I shall never marry; and why should you speak of my having children! I am just as likely to give birth to a Nero as to an Augustus.”
Having assumed the throne, she ruled with a strictness of government such as Sweden had not known before. She took the reins of state into her own hands and carried out a foreign policy of her own, over the heads of her ministers, and even against the wishes of her people. The fighting upon the Continent had dragged out to a weary length, but the Swedes, on the whole, had scored a marked advantage. For this reason the war was popular, and every one wished it to go on; but Christina, of her own will, decided that it must stop, that mere glory was not to be considered against material advantages. Sweden had had enough of glory; she must now look to her enrichment and prosperity through the channels of peace.
Therefore, in 1648, against Oxenstierna, against her generals, and against her people, she exercised her royal power and brought the Thirty Years’ War to an end by the so-called Peace of Westphalia. At this time she was twenty-two, and by her personal influence she had ended one of the greatest struggles of history. Nor had she done it to her country’s loss. Denmark yielded up rich provinces, while Germany was compelled to grant Sweden membership in the German diet.
Then came a period of immense prosperity through commerce, through economies in government, through the improvement of agriculture and the opening of mines. This girl queen, without intrigue, without descending from her native nobility to peep and whisper with shady diplomats, showed herself in reality a great monarch, a true Semiramis of the north, more worthy of respect and reverence than Elizabeth of England. She was highly trained in many arts. She was fond of study, spoke Latin fluently, and could argue with Salmasius, Descartes, and other accomplished scholars without showing any inferiority to them.
She gathered at her court distinguished persons from all countries. She repelled those who sought her hand, and she was pure and truthful and worthy of all men’s admiration. Had she died at this time history would rank her with the greatest of women sovereigns. Naude, the librarian of Cardinal Mazarin, wrote of her to the scientist Gassendi in these words:
To say truth, I am sometimes afraid lest the common saying should be verified in her, that short is the life and rare the old age of those who surpass the common limits. Do not imagine that she is learned only in books, for she is equally so in painting, architecture, sculpture, medals, antiquities, and all curiosities. There is not a cunning workman in these arts but she has him fetched. There are as good workers in wax and in enamel, engravers, singers, players, dancers here as will be found anywhere.
She has a gallery of statues, bronze and marble, medals of gold, silver, and bronze, pieces of ivory, amber, coral, worked crystal, steel mirrors, clocks and tables, bas-reliefs and other things of the kind; richer I have never seen even in Italy; finally, a great quantity of pictures. In short, her mind is open to all impressions.
But after she began to make her court a sort of home for art and letters it ceased to be the sort of court that Sweden was prepared for. Christina’s subjects were still rude and lacking in accomplishments; therefore she had to summon men of genius from other countries, especially from France and Italy. Many of these were illustrious artists or scholars, but among them were also some who used their mental gifts for harm.
Among these latter was a French physician named Bourdelot–a man of keen intellect, of winning manners, and of a profound cynicism, which was not apparent on the surface, but the effect of which last lasting. To Bourdelot we must chiefly ascribe the mysterious change which gradually came over Queen Christina. With his associates he taught her a distaste for the simple and healthy life that she had been accustomed to lead. She ceased to think of the welfare of the state and began to look down with scorn upon her unsophisticated Swedes. Foreign luxury displayed itself at Stockholm, and her palaces overflowed with beautiful things.
By subtle means Bourdelot undermined her principles. Having been a Stoic, she now became an Epicurean. She was by nature devoid of sentiment. She would not spend her time in the niceties of love- making, as did Elizabeth; but beneath the surface she had a sort of tigerish, passionate nature, which would break forth at intervals, and which demanded satisfaction from a series of favorites. It is probable that Bourdelot was her first lover, but there were many others whose names are recorded in the annals of the time.
When she threw aside her virtue Christina ceased to care about appearances. She squandered her revenues upon her favorites. What she retained of her former self was a carelessness that braved the opinion of her subjects. She dressed almost without thought, and it is said that she combed her hair not more than twice a month. She caroused with male companions to the scandal of her people, and she swore like a trooper when displeased.
Christina’s philosophy of life appears to have been compounded of an almost brutal licentiousness, a strong love of power, and a strange, freakish longing for something new. Her political ambitions were checked by the rising discontent of her people, who began to look down upon her and to feel ashamed of her shame. Knowing herself as she did, she did not care to marry.
Yet Sweden must have an heir. Therefore she chose out her cousin Charles, declared that he was to be her successor, and finally caused him to be proclaimed as such before the assembled estates of the realm. She even had him crowned; and finally, in her twenty-eighth year, she abdicated altogether and prepared to leave Sweden. When asked whither she would go, she replied in a Latin quotation:
“The Fates will show the way.”
In her act of abdication she reserved to herself the revenues of some of the richest provinces in Sweden and absolute power over such of her subjects as should accompany her. They were to be her subjects until the end.
The Swedes remembered that Christina was the daughter of their greatest king, and that, apart from personal scandals, she had ruled them well; and so they let her go regretfully and accepted her cousin as their king. Christina, on her side, went joyfully and in the spirit of a grand adventuress. With a numerous suite she entered Germany, and then stayed for a year at Brussels, where she renounced Lutheranism. After this she traveled slowly into Italy, where she entered Borne on horseback, and was received by the Pope, Alexander VII., who lodged her in a magnificent palace, accepted her conversion, and baptized her, giving her a new name, Alexandra.
In Rome she was a brilliant but erratic personage, living sumptuously, even though her revenues from Sweden came in slowly, partly because the Swedes disliked her change of religion. She was surrounded by men of letters, with whom she amused herself, and she took to herself a lover, the Marquis Monaldeschi. She thought that at last she had really found her true affinity, while Monaldeschi believed that he could count on the queen’s fidelity.
He was in attendance upon her daily, and they were almost inseparable. He swore allegiance to her and thereby made himself one of the subjects over whom she had absolute power. For a time he was the master of those intense emotions which, in her, alternated with moods of coldness and even cruelty.
Monaldeschi was a handsome Italian, who bore himself with a fine air of breeding. He understood the art of charming, but he did not know that beyond a certain time no one could hold the affections of Christina.
However, after she had quarreled with various cardinals and decided to leave Rome for a while, Monaldeschi accompanied her to France, where she had an immense vogue at the court of Louis XIV. She attracted wide attention because of her eccentricity and utter lack of manners. It gave her the greatest delight to criticize the ladies of the French court–their looks, their gowns, and their jewels. They, in return, would speak of Christina’s deformed shoulder and skinny frame; but the king was very gracious to her and invited her to his hunting-palace at Fontainebleau.
While she had been winning triumphs of sarcasm the infatuated Monaldeschi had gradually come to suspect, and then to know, that his royal mistress was no longer true to him. He had been supplanted in her favor by another Italian, one Sentanelli, who was the captain of her guard.
Monaldeschi took a tortuous and roundabout revenge. He did not let the queen know of his discovery; nor did he, like a man, send a challenge to Sentanelli. Instead he began by betraying her secrets to Oliver Cromwell, with whom she had tried to establish a correspondence. Again, imitating the hand and seal of Sentanelli, he set in circulation a series of the most scandalous and insulting letters about Christina. By this treacherous trick he hoped to end the relations between his rival and the queen; but when the letters were carried to Christina she instantly recognized their true source. She saw that she was betrayed by her former favorite and that he had taken a revenge which might seriously compromise her.
This led to a tragedy, of which the facts were long obscure. They were carefully recorded, however, by the queen’s household chaplain, Father Le Bel; and there is also a narrative written by one Marco Antonio Conti, which confirms the story. Both were published privately in 1865, with notes by Louis Lacour.
The narration of the priest is dreadful in its simplicity and minuteness of detail. It may be summed up briefly here, because it is the testimony of an eye-witness who knew Christina.
Christina, with the marquis and a large retinue, was at Fontainebleau in November, 1657. A little after midnight, when all was still, the priest, Father Le Bel, was aroused and ordered to go at once to the Galerie des Cerfs, or Hall of Stags, in another part of the palace. When he asked why, he was told:
“It is by the order of her majesty the Swedish queen.”
The priest, wondering, hurried on his garments. On reaching the gloomy hall he saw the Marquis Monaldeschi, evidently in great agitation, and at the end of the corridor the queen in somber robes. Beside the queen, as if awaiting orders, stood three figures, who could with some difficulty be made out as three soldiers of her guard.
The queen motioned to Father Le Bel and asked him for a packet which she had given him for safe-keeping some little time before. He gave it to her, and she opened it. In it were letters and other documents, which, with a steely glance, she displayed to Monaldeschi. He was confused by the sight of them and by the incisive words in which Christina showed how he had both insulted her and had tried to shift the blame upon Sentanelli.
Monaldeschi broke down completely. He fell at the queen’s feet and wept piteously, begging for pardon, only to be met by the cold answer:
“You are my subject and a traitor to me. Marquis, you must prepare to die!”
Then she turned away and left the hall, in spite of the cries of Monaldeschi, to whom she merely added the advice that he should make his peace with God by confessing to Father Le Bel.
After she had gone the marquis fell into a torrent of self- exculpation and cried for mercy. The three armed men drew near and urged him to confess for the good of his soul. They seemed to have no malice against him, but to feel that they must obey the orders given them. At the frantic urging of the marquis their leader even went to the queen to ask whether she would relent; but he returned shaking his head, and said:
“Marquis, you must die.”
Father Le Bel undertook a like mission, but returned with the message that there was no hope. So the marquis made his confession in French and Latin, but even then he hoped; for he did not wait to receive absolution, but begged still further for delay or pardon.
Then the three armed men approached, having drawn their swords. The absolution was pronounced; and, following it, one of the guards slashed the marquis across the forehead. He stumbled and fell forward, making signs as if to ask that he might have his throat cut. But his throat was partly protected by a coat of mail, so that three or four strokes delivered there had slight effect. Finally, however, a long, narrow sword was thrust into his side, after which the marquis made no sound.
Father Le Bel at once left the Galerie des Cerfs and went into the queen’s apartment, with the smell of blood in his nostrils. He found her calm and ready to justify herself. Was she not still queen over all who had voluntarily become members of her suite? This had been agreed to in her act of abdication. Wherever she set her foot, there, over her own, she was still a monarch, with full power to punish traitors at her will. This power she had exercised, and with justice. What mattered it that she was in France? She was queen as truly as Louis XIV. was king.
The story was not long in getting out, but the truth was not wholly known until a much later day. It was said that Sentanelli had slapped the marquis in a fit of jealousy, though some added that it was done with the connivance of the queen. King Louis, the incarnation of absolutism, knew the truth, but he was slow to act. He sympathized with the theory of Christina’s sovereignty. It was only after a time that word was sent to Christina that she must leave Fontainebleau. She took no notice of the order until it suited her convenience, and then she went forth with all the honors of a reigning monarch.
This was the most striking episode in all the strange story of her private life. When her cousin Charles, whom she had made king, died without an heir she sought to recover her crown; but the estates of the realm refused her claim, reduced her income, and imposed restraints upon her power. She then sought the vacant throne of Poland; but the Polish nobles, who desired a weak ruler for their own purposes, made another choice. So at last she returned to Rome, where the Pope received her with a splendid procession and granted her twelve thousand crowns a year to make up for her lessened Swedish revenue.
From this time she lived a life which she made interesting by her patronage of learning and exciting by her rather unseemly quarrels with cardinals and even with the Pope. Her armed retinue marched through the streets with drawn swords and gave open protection to criminals who had taken refuge with her. She dared to criticize the pontiff, who merely smiled and said:
“She is a woman!”
On the whole, the end of her life was pleasant. She was much admired for her sagacity in politics. Her words were listened to at every court in Europe. She annotated the classics, she made beautiful collections, and she was regarded as a privileged person whose acts no one took amiss. She died at fifty-three, and was buried in St. Peter’s.
She was bred a man, she was almost a son to her great father; and yet, instead of the sonorous epitaph that is inscribed beside her tomb, perhaps a truer one would be the words of the vexed Pope:
“E DONNA!”
KING CHARLES II. AND NELL GWYN
One might classify the kings of England in many ways. John was undoubtedly the most unpopular. The impetuous yet far-seeing Henry II., with the other two great warriors, Edward I. and Edward III., and William of Orange, did most for the foundation and development of England’s constitutional law. Some monarchs, such as Edward II. and the womanish Henry VI., have been contemptible. Hard-working, useful kings have been Henry VII., the Georges, William IV., and especially the last Edward.
If we consider those monarchs who have in some curious way touched the popular fancy without reference to their virtues we must go back to Richard of the Lion Heart, who saw but little of England, yet was the best essentially English king, and to Henry V., gallant soldier and conqueror of France. Even Henry VIII. had a warm place in the affection of his countrymen, few of whom saw him near at hand, but most of whom made him a sort of regal incarnation of John Bull–wrestling and tilting and boxing, eating great joints of beef, and staying his thirst with flagons of ale– a big, healthy, masterful animal, in fact, who gratified the national love of splendor and stood up manfully in his struggle with the Pope.
But if you look for something more than ordinary popularity– something that belongs to sentiment and makes men willing to become martyrs for a royal cause–we must find these among the Stuart kings. It is odd, indeed, that even at this day there are Englishmen and Englishwomen who believe their lawful sovereign to be a minor Bavarian princess in whose veins there runs the Stuart blood. Prayers are said for her at English shrines, and toasts are drunk to her in rare old wine.
Of course, to-day this cult of the Stuarts is nothing but a fad. No one ever expects to see a Stuart on the English throne. But it is significant of the deep strain of romance which the six Stuarts who reigned in England have implanted in the English heart. The old Jacobite ballads still have power to thrill. Queen Victoria herself used to have the pipers file out before her at Balmoral to the “skirling” of “Bonnie Dundee,” “Over the Water to Charlie,” and “Wha’ll Be King but Charlie!” It is a sentiment that has never died. Her late majesty used to say that when she heard these tunes she became for the moment a Jacobite; just as the Empress Eugenie at the height of her power used pertly to remark that she herself was the only Legitimist left in France.
It may be suggested that the Stuarts are still loved by many Englishmen because they were unfortunate; yet this is hardly true, after all. Many of them were fortunate enough. The first of them, King James, an absurd creature, speaking broad Scotch, timid, foolishly fond of favorites, and having none of the dignity of a monarch, lived out a lengthy reign. The two royal women of the family–Anne and Mary–had no misfortunes of a public nature. Charles II. reigned for more than a quarter of a century, lapped in every kind of luxury, and died a king.
The first Charles was beheaded and afterward styled a “saint”; yet the majority of the English people were against his arrogance, or else he would have won his great struggle against Parliament. The second James was not popular at all. Nevertheless, no sooner had he been expelled, and been succeeded by a Dutchman gnawing asparagus and reeking of cheeses, than there was already a Stuart legend. Even had there been no pretenders to carry on the cult, the Stuarts would still have passed into history as much loved by the people.
It only shows how very little in former days the people expected of a regnant king. Many monarchs have had just a few popular traits, and these have stood out brilliantly against the darkness of the background.
No one could have cared greatly for the first James, but Charles I. was indeed a kingly personage when viewed afar. He was handsome, as a man, fully equaling the French princess who became his wife. He had no personal vices. He was brave, and good to look upon, and had a kingly mien. Hence, although he sought to make his rule over England a tyranny, there were many fine old cavaliers to ride afield for him when he raised his standard, and who, when he died, mourned for him as a “martyr.”
Many hardships they underwent while Cromwell ruled with his iron hand; and when that iron hand was relaxed in death, and poor, feeble Richard Cromwell slunk away to his country-seat, what wonder is it that young Charles came back to England and caracoled through the streets of London with a smile for every one and a happy laugh upon his lips? What wonder is it that the cannon in the Tower thundered a loud welcome, and that all over England, at one season or another, maypoles rose and Christmas fires blazed? For Englishmen at heart are not only monarchists, but they are lovers of good cheer and merrymaking and all sorts of mirth.
Charles II. might well at first have seemed a worthier and wiser successor to his splendid father. As a child, even, he had shown himself to be no faint-hearted creature. When the great Civil War broke out he had joined his father’s army. It met with disaster at Edgehill, and was finally shattered by the crushing defeat of Naseby, which afterward inspired Macaulay’s most stirring ballad.
Charles was then only a child of twelve, and so his followers did wisely in hurrying him out of England, through the Scilly isles and Jersey to his mother’s place of exile. Of course, a child so very young could be of no value as a leader, though his presence might prove an inspiration.
In 1648, however, when he was eighteen years of age, he gathered a fleet of eighteen ships and cruised along the English coast, taking prizes, which he carried to the Dutch ports. When he was at Holland’s capital, during his father’s trial, he wrote many messages to the Parliamentarians, and even sent them a blank charter, which they might fill in with any stipulations they desired if only they would save and restore their king.
When the head of Charles rolled from the velvet-covered block his son showed himself to be no loiterer or lover of an easy life. He hastened to Scotland, skilfully escaping an English force, and was proclaimed as king and crowned at Scone, in 1651. With ten thousand men he dashed into England, where he knew there were many who would rally at his call. But it was then that Cromwell put forth his supreme military genius and with his Ironsides crushed the royal troops at Worcester.
Charles knew that for the present all was lost. He showed courage and address in covering the flight of his beaten soldiers; but he soon afterward went to France, remaining there and in the Netherlands for eight years as a pensioner of Louis XIV. He knew that time would fight for him far more surely than infantry and horse. England had not been called “Merry England” for nothing; and Cromwell’s tyranny was likely to be far more resented than the heavy hand of one who was born a king. So Charles at Paris and Liege, though he had little money at the time, managed to maintain a royal court, such as it was.
Here there came out another side of his nature. As a child he had borne hardship and privation and had seen the red blood flow upon the battlefield. Now, as it were, he allowed a certain sensuous, pleasure-loving ease to envelop him. The red blood should become the rich red burgundy; the sound of trumpets and kettledrums should give way to the melody of lutes and viols. He would be a king of pleasure if he were to be king at all. And therefore his court, even in exile, was a court of gallantry and ease. The Pope refused to lend him money, and the King of France would not increase his pension, but there were many who foresaw that Charles would not long remain in exile; and so they gave him what he wanted and waited until he could give them what they would ask for in their turn.
Charles at this time was not handsome, like his father. His complexion was swarthy, his figure by no means imposing, though always graceful. When he chose he could bear himself with all the dignity of a monarch. He had a singularly pleasant manner, and a word from him could win over the harshest opponent.
The old cavaliers who accompanied their master in exile were like Napoleon’s veterans in Elba. With their tall, powerful forms they stalked about the courtyards, sniffing their disapproval at these foreign ways and longing grimly for the time when they could once more smell the pungent powder of the battle-field. But, as Charles had hoped, the change was coming. Not merely were his own subjects beginning to long for him and to pray in secret for the king, but continental monarchs who maintained spies in England began to know of this. To them Charles was no longer a penniless exile. He was a king who before long would take possession of his kingdom.
A very wise woman–the Queen Regent of Portugal–was the first to act on this information. Portugal was then very far from being a petty state. It had wealth at home and rich colonies abroad, while its flag was seen on every sea. The queen regent, being at odds with Spain, and wishing to secure an ally against that power, made overtures to Charles, asking him whether a match might not be made between him and the Princess Catharine of Braganza. It was not merely her daughter’s hand that she offered, but a splendid dowry. She would pay Charles a million pounds in gold and cede to England two valuable ports.
The match was not yet made, but by 1659 it had been arranged. The Spaniards were furious, for Charles’s cause began to appear successful.
She was a quaint and rather piteous little figure, she who was destined to be the wife of the Merry Monarch. Catharine was dark, petite, and by no means beautiful; yet she had a very sweet expression and a heart of utter innocence. She had been wholly convent-bred. She knew nothing of the world. She was told that in marriage she must obey in all things, and that the chief duty of a wife was to make her husband happy.
Poor child! It was a too gracious preparation for a very graceless husband. Charles, in exile, had already made more than one discreditable connection and he was already the father of more than one growing son.
First of all, he had been smitten by the bold ways of one Lucy Walters. Her impudence amused the exiled monarch. She was not particularly beautiful, and when she spoke as others did she was rather tiresome; but her pertness and the inexperience of the king when he went into exile made her seem attractive. She bore him a son, in the person of that brilliant adventurer whom Charles afterward created Duke of Monmouth. Many persons believe that Charles had married Lucy Walters, just as George IV. may have married Mrs. Fitzherbert; yet there is not the slightest proof of it, and it must be classed with popular legends.
There was also one Catherine Peg, or Kep, whose son was afterward made Earl of Plymouth. It must be confessed that in his attachments to English women Charles showed little care for rank or station. Lucy Walters and Catherine Peg were very illiterate creatures.
In a way it was precisely this sort of preference that made Charles so popular among the people. He seemed to make rank of no account, but would chat in the most familiar and friendly way with any one whom he happened to meet. His easy, democratic manner, coupled with the grace and prestige of royalty, made friends for him all over England. The treasury might be nearly bankrupt; the navy might be routed by the Dutch; the king himself might be too much given to dissipation; but his people forgave him all, because everybody knew that Charles would clap an honest citizen on the back and joke with all who came to see him feed the swans in Regent’s Park.
The popular name for him was “Rowley,” or “Old Rowley”–a nickname of mysterious origin, though it is said to have been given him from a fancied resemblance to a famous hunter in his stables. Perhaps it is the very final test of popularity that a ruler should have a nickname known to every one.
Cromwell’s death roused all England to a frenzy of king-worship. The Roundhead, General Monk, and his soldiers proclaimed Charles King of England and escorted him to London in splendid state. That was a day when national feeling reached a point such as never has been before or since. Oughtred, the famous mathematician, died of joy when the royal emblems were restored. Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, died, it is said, of laughter at the people’s wild delight–a truly Rabelaisian end.
There was the king once more; and England, breaking through its long period of Puritanism, laughed and danced with more vivacity than ever the French had shown. All the pipers and the players and panderers to vice, the mountebanks, the sensual men, and the lawless women poured into the presence of the king, who had been too long deprived of the pleasure that his nature craved. Parliament voted seventy thousand pounds for a memorial to Charles’s father, but the irresponsible king spent the whole sum on the women who surrounded him. His severest counselor, Lord Clarendon, sent him a remonstrance.
“How can I build such a memorial,” asked Charles, “when I don’t know where my father’s remains are buried!”
He took money from the King of France to make war against the Dutch, who had befriended him. It was the French king, too, who sent him that insidious, subtle daughter of Brittany, Louise de Keroualle–Duchess of Portsmouth–a diplomat in petticoats, who won the king’s wayward affections, and spied on what he did and said, and faithfully reported all of it to Paris. She became the mother of the Duke of Lenox, and she was feared and hated by the English more than any other of his mistresses. They called her “Madam Carwell,” and they seemed to have an instinct that she was no mere plaything of his idle hours, but was like some strange exotic serpent, whose poison might in the end sting the honor of England.
There is a pitiful little episode in the marriage of Charles with his Portuguese bride, Catharine of Braganza. The royal girl came to him fresh from the cloisters of her convent. There was something about her grace and innocence that touched the dissolute monarch, who was by no means without a heart. For a time he treated her with great respect, and she was happy. At last she began to notice about her strange faces–faces that were evil, wanton, or overbold. The court became more and more a seat of reckless revelry.
Finally Catharine was told that the Duchess of Cleveland–that splendid termagant, Barbara Villiers–had been appointed lady of the bedchamber. She was told at the same time who this vixen was– that she was no fit attendant for a virtuous woman, and that her three sons, the Dukes of Southampton, Grafton, and Northumberland, were also the sons of Charles.
Fluttered and frightened and dismayed, the queen hastened to her husband and begged him not to put this slight upon her. A year or two before, she had never dreamed that life contained such things as these; but now it seemed to contain nothing else. Charles spoke sternly to her until she burst into tears, and then he petted her and told her that her duty as a queen compelled her to submit to many things which a lady in private life need not endure.
After a long and poignant struggle with her own emotions the little Portuguese yielded to the wishes of her lord. She never again reproached him. She even spoke with kindness to his favorites and made him feel that she studied his happiness alone. Her gentleness affected him so that he always spoke to her with courtesy and real friendship. When the Protestant mobs sought to drive her out of England he showed his courage and manliness by standing by her and refusing to allow her to be molested.
Indeed, had Charles been always at his best he would have had a very different name in history. He could be in every sense a king. He had a keen knowledge of human nature. Though he governed England very badly, he never governed it so badly as to lose his popularity.
The epigram of Rochester, written at the king’s own request, was singularly true of Charles. No man relied upon his word, yet men loved him. He never said anything that was foolish, and he very seldom did anything that was wise; yet his easy manners and gracious ways endeared him to those who met him.
One can find no better picture of his court than that which Sir Walter Scott has drawn so vividly in Peveril of the Peak; or, if one wishes first-hand evidence, it can be found in the diaries of Evelyn and of Samuel Pepys. In them we find the rakes and dicers, full of strange oaths, deep drunkards, vile women and still viler men, all striving for the royal favor and offering the filthiest lures, amid routs and balls and noisy entertainments, of which it is recorded that more than once some woman gave birth to a child among the crowd of dancers.
No wonder that the little Portuguese queen kept to herself and did not let herself be drawn into this swirling, roaring, roistering saturnalia. She had less influence even than Moll Davis, whom Charles picked out of a coffee-house, and far less than “Madam Carwell,” to whom it is reported that a great English nobleman once presented pearls to the value of eight thousand pounds in order to secure her influence in a single stroke of political business.
Of all the women who surrounded Charles there was only one who cared anything for him or for England. The rest were all either selfish or treacherous or base. This one exception has been so greatly written of, both in fiction and in history, as to make it seem almost unnecessary to add another word; yet it may well be worth while to separate the fiction from the fact and to see how much of the legend of Eleanor Gwyn is true.
The fanciful story of her birthplace is most surely quite unfounded. She was not the daughter of a Welsh officer, but of two petty hucksters who had their booth in the lowest precincts of London. In those days the Strand was partly open country, and as it neared the city it showed the mansions of the gentry set in their green-walled parks. At one end of the Strand, however, was Drury Lane, then the haunt of criminals and every kind of wretch, while nearer still was the notorious Coal Yard, where no citizen dared go unarmed.
Within this dreadful place children were kidnapped and trained to various forms of vice. It was a school for murderers and robbers and prostitutes; and every night when the torches flared it vomited forth its deadly spawn. Here was the earliest home of Eleanor Gwyn, and out of this den of iniquity she came at night to sell oranges at the entrance to the theaters. She was stage- struck, and endeavored to get even a minor part in a play; but Betterton, the famous actor, thrust her aside when she ventured to apply to him.
It must be said that in everything that was external, except her beauty, she fell short of a fastidious taste. She was intensely ignorant even for that time. She spoke in a broad Cockney dialect. She had lived the life of the Coal Yard, and, like Zola’s Nana, she could never remember the time when she had known the meaning of chastity.
Nell Gwyn was, in fact, a product of the vilest slums of London; and precisely because she was this we must set her down as intrinsically a good woman–one of the truest, frankest, and most right-minded of whom the history of such women has anything to tell. All that external circumstances could do to push her down into the mire was done; yet she was not pushed down, but emerged as one of those rare souls who have in their natures an uncontaminated spring of goodness and honesty. Unlike Barbara Villiers or Lucy Walters or Louise de Keroualle, she was neither a harpy nor a foe to England.
Charles is said first to have met her when he, incognito, with another friend, was making the rounds of the theaters at night. The king spied her glowing, nut-brown face in one of the boxes, and, forgetting his incognito, went up and joined her. She was with her protector of the time, Lord Buckhurst, who, of course, recognized his majesty.
Presently the whole party went out to a neighboring coffee-house, where they drank and ate together. When it came time to pay the reckoning the king found that he had no money, nor had his friend. Lord Buckhurst, therefore, paid the bill, while Mistress Nell jeered at the other two, saying that this was the most poverty- stricken party that she had ever met.
Charles did not lose sight of her. Her frankness and honest manner pleased him. There came a time when she was known to be a mistress of the king, and she bore a son, who was ennobled as the Duke of St. Albans, but who did not live to middle age. Nell Gwyn was much with Charles; and after his tempestuous scenes with Barbara Villiers, and the feeling of dishonor which the Duchess of Portsmouth made him experience, the girl’s good English bluntness was a pleasure far more rare than sentiment.
Somehow, just as the people had come to mistrust “Madam Carwell,” so they came to like Nell Gwyn. She saw enough of Charles, and she liked him well enough, to wish that he might do his duty by his people; and she alone had the boldness to speak out what she thought. One day she found him lolling in an arm-chair and complaining that the people were not satisfied.
“You can very easily satisfy them,” said Nell Gwyn. “Dismiss your women and attend to the proper business of a king.”
Again, her heart was touched at the misfortunes of the old soldiers who had fought for Charles and for his father during the Civil War, and who were now neglected, while the treasury was emptied for French favorites, and while the policy of England itself was bought and sold in France. Many and many a time, when other women of her kind used their lures to get jewels or titles or estates or actual heaps of money, Nell Gwyn besought the king to aid these needy veterans. Because of her efforts Chelsea Hospital was founded. Such money as she had she shared with the poor and with those who had fought for her royal lover.
As I have said, she is a historical type of the woman who loses her physical purity, yet who retains a sense of honor and of honesty which nothing can take from her. There are not many such examples, and therefore this one is worth remembering.
Of anecdotes concerning her there are many, but not often has their real import been detected. If she could twine her arms about the monarch’s neck and transport him in a delirium of passion, this was only part of what she did. She tried to keep him right and true and worthy of his rank; and after he had ceased to care much for her as a lover he remembered that she had been faithful in many other things.
Then there came the death-bed scene, when Charles, in his inimitable manner, apologized to those about him because he was so long in dying. A far sincerer sentence was that which came from his heart, as he cried out, in the very pangs of death:
“Do not let poor Nelly starve!”
MAURICE OF SAXONY AND ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR
It is an old saying that to every womanly woman self-sacrifice is almost a necessity of her nature. To make herself of small account as compared with the one she loves; to give freely of herself, even though she may receive nothing in return; to suffer, and yet to feel an inner poignant joy in all this suffering–here is a most wonderful trait of womanhood. Perhaps it is akin to the maternal instinct; for to the mother, after she has felt the throb of a new life within her, there is no sacrifice so great and no anguish so keen that she will not welcome it as the outward sign and evidence of her illimitable love.
In most women this spirit of self-sacrifice is checked and kept within ordinary bounds by the circumstances of their lives. In many small things they do yield and they do suffer; yet it is not in yielding and in suffering that they find their deepest joy.
There are some, however, who seem to have been born with an abnormal capacity for enduring hardship and mental anguish; so that by a sort of contradiction they find their happiness in sorrow. Such women are endowed with a remarkable degree of sensibility. They feel intensely. In moments of grief and disappointment, and even of despair, there steals over them a sort of melancholy pleasure. It is as if they loved dim lights and mournful music and scenes full of sad suggestion.
If everything goes well with them, they are unwilling to believe that such good fortune will last. If anything goes wrong with them, they are sure that this is only the beginning of something even worse. The music of their lives is written in a minor key.
Now, for such women as these, the world at large has very little charity. It speaks slightingly of them as “agonizers.” It believes that they are “fond of making scenes.” It regards as an affectation something that is really instinctive and inevitable. Unless such women are beautiful and young and charming they are treated badly; and this is often true in spite of all their natural attractiveness, for they seem to court ill usage as if they were saying frankly:
“Come, take us! We will give you everything and ask for nothing. We do not expect true and enduring love. Do not be constant or generous or even kind. We know that we shall suffer. But, none the less, in our sorrow there will be sweetness, and even in our abasement we shall feel a sort of triumph.”
In history there is one woman who stands out conspicuously as a type of her melancholy sisterhood, one whose life was full of disappointment even when she was most successful, and of indignity even when she was most sought after and admired. This woman was Adrienne Lecouvreur, famous in the annals of the stage, and still more famous in the annals of unrequited–or, at any rate, unhappy –love.
Her story is linked with that of a man no less remarkable than herself, a hero of chivalry, a marvel of courage, of fascination, and of irresponsibility.
Adrienne Lecouvreur–her name was originally Couvreur–was born toward the end of the seventeenth century in the little French village of Damery, not far from Rheims, where her aunt was a laundress and her father a hatter in a small way. Of her mother, who died in childbirth, we know nothing; but her father was a man of gloomy and ungovernable temper, breaking out into violent fits of passion, in one of which, long afterward, he died, raving and yelling like a maniac.
Adrienne was brought up at the wash-tub, and became accustomed to a wandering life, in which she went from one town to another. What she had inherited from her mother is, of course, not known; but she had all her father’s strangely pessimistic temper, softened only by the fact that she was a girl. From her earliest years she was unhappy; yet her unhappiness was largely of her own choosing. Other girls of her own station met life cheerfully, worked away from dawn till dusk, and then had their moments of amusement, and even jollity, with their companions, after the fashion of all children. But Adrienne Lecouvreur was unhappy because she chose to be. It was not the wash-tub that made her so, for she had been born to it; nor was it the half-mad outbreaks of her father, because to her, at least, he was not unkind. Her discontent sprang from her excessive sensibility.
Indeed, for a peasant child she had reason to think herself far more fortunate than her associates. Her intelligence was great. Ambition was awakened in her before she was ten years of age, when she began to learn and to recite poems–learning them, as has been said, “between the wash-tub and the ironing-board,” and reciting them to the admiration of older and wiser people than she. Even at ten she was a very beautiful child, with great lambent eyes, an exquisite complexion, and a lovely form, while she had the further gift of a voice that thrilled the listener and, when she chose, brought tears to every eye. She was, indeed, a natural elocutionist, knowing by instinct all those modulations of tone and varied cadences which go to the hearer’s heart.
It was very like Adrienne Lecouvreur to memorize only such poems as were mournful, just as in after life she could win success upon the stage only in tragic parts. She would repeat with a sort of ecstasy the pathetic poems that were then admired; and she was soon able to give up her menial work, because many people asked her to their houses so that they could listen to the divinely beautiful voice charged with the emotion which was always at her command.
When she was thirteen her father moved to Paris, where she was placed at school–a very humble school in a very humble quarter of the city. Yet even there her genius showed itself at that early age. A number of children and young people, probably influenced by Adrienne, formed themselves into a theatrical company from the pure love of acting. A friendly grocer let them have an empty store-room for their performances, and in this store-room Adrienne Lecouvreur first acted in a tragedy by Corneille, assuming the part of leading woman.
Her genius for the stage was like the genius of Napoleon for war. She had had no teaching. She had never been inside of any theater; and yet she delivered the magnificent lines with all the power and fire and effectiveness of a most accomplished actress. People thronged to see her and to feel the tempest of emotion which shook her as she sustained her part, which for the moment was as real to her as life itself.
At first only the people of the neighborhood knew anything about these amateur performances; but presently a lady of rank, one Mme. du Gue, came out of curiosity and was fascinated by the little actress. Mme. du Gue offered the spacious courtyard of her own house, and fitted it with some of the appurtenances of a theater. From that moment the fame of Adrienne spread throughout all Paris. The courtyard was crowded by gentlemen and ladies, by people of distinction from the court, and at last even by actors and actresses from the Comedie Franchise.
It is, in fact, a remarkable tribute to Adrienne that in her thirteenth year she excited so much jealousy among the actors of the Comedie that they evoked the law against her. Theaters required a royal license, and of course poor little Adrienne’s company had none. Hence legal proceedings were begun, and the most famous actresses in Paris talked of having these clever children imprisoned! Upon this the company sought the precincts of the Temple, where no legal warrant could be served without the express order of the king himself.
There for a time the performances still went on. Finally, as the other children were not geniuses, but merely boys and girls in search of fun, the little company broke up. Its success, however, had determined for ever the career of Adrienne. With her beautiful face, her lithe and exquisite figure, her golden voice, and her instinctive art, it was plain enough that her future lay upon the stage; and so at fourteen or fifteen she began where most actresses leave off–accomplished and attractive, and having had a practical training in her profession.
Diderot, in that same century, observed that the truest actor is one who does not feel his part at all, but produces his effects by intellectual effort and intelligent observation. Behind the figure on the stage, torn with passion or rollicking with mirth, there must always be the cool and unemotional mind which directs and governs and controls. This same theory was both held and practised by the late Benoit Constant Coquelin. To some extent it was the theory of Garrick and Fechter and Edwin Booth; though it was rejected by the two Keans, and by Edwin Forrest, who entered so throughly into the character which he assumed, and who let loose such tremendous bursts of passion that other actors dreaded to support him on the stage in such parts as Spartacus and Metamora.
It is needless to say that a girl like Adrienne Lecouvreur flung herself with all the intensity of her nature into every role she played. This was the greatest secret of her success; for, with her, nature rose superior to art. On the other hand, it fixed her dramatic limitations, for it barred her out of comedy. Her melancholy, morbid disposition was in the fullest sympathy with tragic heroines; but she failed when she tried to represent the lighter moods and the merry moments of those who welcome mirth. She could counterfeit despair, and unforced tears would fill her eyes; but she could not laugh and romp and simulate a gaiety that was never hers.
Adrienne would have been delighted to act at one of the theaters in Paris; but they were closed to her through jealousy. She went into the provinces, in the eastern part of France, and for ten years she was a leading lady there in many companies and in many towns. As she blossomed into womanhood there came into her life the love which was to be at once a source of the most profound interest and of the most intense agony.
It is odd that all her professional success never gave her any happiness. The life of the actress who traveled from town to town, the crude and coarse experiences which she had to undergo, the disorder and the unsettled mode of living, all produced in her a profound disgust. She was of too exquisite a fiber to live in such a way, especially in a century when the refinements of existence were for the very few.
She speaks herself of “obligatory amusements, the insistence of men, and of love affairs.” Yet how could such a woman as Adrienne Lecouvreur keep herself from love affairs? The motion of the stage and its mimic griefs satisfied her only while she was actually upon the boards. Love offered her an emotional excitement that endured and that was always changing. It was “the profoundest instinct of her being”; and she once wrote: “What could one do in the world without loving?”
Still, through these ten years she seems to have loved only that she might be unhappy. There was a strange twist in her mind. Men who were honorable and who loved her with sincerity she treated very badly. Men who were indifferent or ungrateful or actually base she seemed to choose by a sort of perverse instinct. Perhaps the explanation of it is that during those ten years, though she had many lovers, she never really loved. She sought excitement, passion, and after that the mournfulness which comes when passion dies. Thus, one man after another came into her life–some of them promising marriage–and she bore two children, whose fathers were unknown, or at least uncertain. But, after all, one can scarcely pity her, since she had not yet in reality known that great passion which comes but once in life. So far she had learned only a sort of feeble cynicism, which she expressed in letters and in such sayings as these:
“There are sweet errors which I would not venture to commit again. My experiences, all too sad, have served to illumine my reason.”
“I am utterly weary of love and prodigiously tempted to have no more of it for the rest of my life; because, after all, I don’t wish either to die or to go mad.”
Yet she also said: “I know too well that no one dies of grief.”
She had had, indeed, some very unfortunate experiences. Men of rank had loved her and had then cast her off. An actor, one Clavel, would have married her, but she would not accept his offer. A magistrate in Strasburg promised marriage; and then, when she was about to accept him, he wrote to her that he was going to yield to the wishes of his family and make a more advantageous alliance. And so she was alternately caressed and repulsed–a mere plaything; and yet this was probably all that she really needed at the time–something to stir her, something to make her mournful or indignant or ashamed.
It was inevitable that at last Adrienne Lecouvreur should appear in Paris. She had won such renown throughout the provinces that even those who were intensely jealous of her were obliged to give her due consideration. In 1717, when she was in her twenty-fifth year, she became a member of the Comedie Franchise. There she made an immediate and most brilliant impression. She easily took the leading place. She was one of the glories of Paris, for she became the fashion outside the theater. For the first time the great classic plays were given, not in the monotonous singsong which had become a sort of theatrical convention, but with all the fire and naturalness of life.
Being the fashion, Mlle. Lecouvreur elevated the social rank of actors and of actresses. Her salon was thronged by men and women of rank. Voltaire wrote poems in her honor. To be invited to her dinners was almost like receiving a decoration from the king. She ought to have been happy, for she had reached the summit of her profession and something more.
Yet still she was unhappy. In all her letters one finds a plaintive tone, a little moaning sound that shows how slightly her nature had been changed. No longer, however, did she throw herself away upon dullards or brutes. An English peer–Lord Peterborough– not realizing that she was different from other actresses of that loose-lived age, said to her coarsely at his first introduction:
“Come now! Show me lots of wit and lots of love.”
The remark was characteristic of the time. Yet Adrienne had learned at least one thing, and that was the discontent which came from light affairs. She had thrown herself away too often. If she could not love with her entire being, if she could not give all that was in her to be given, whether of her heart or mind or soul, then she would love no more at all.
At this time there came to Paris a man remarkable in his own century, and one who afterward became almost a hero of romance. This was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, as the French called him, his German name and title being Moritz, Graf von Sachsen, while we usually term him, in English, Marshal Saxe. Maurice de Saxe was now, in 1721, entering his twenty-fifth year. Already, though so young, his career had been a strange one; and it was destined to be still more remarkable. He was the natural son of Duke Augustus II. of Saxony, who later became King of Poland, and who is known in history as Augustus the Strong.
Augustus was a giant in stature and in strength, handsome, daring, unscrupulous, and yet extremely fascinating. His life was one of revelry and fighting and display. When in his cups he would often call for a horseshoe and twist it into a knot with his powerful fingers. Many were his mistresses; but the one for whom he cared the most was a beautiful and high-spirited Swedish girl of rank, Aurora von Konigsmarck. She was descended from a rough old field- marshal who in the Thirty Years’ War had slashed and sacked and pillaged and plundered to his heart’s content. From him Aurora von Konigsmarck seemed to have inherited a high spirit and a sort of lawlessness which charmed the stalwart Augustus of Poland.
Their son, Maurice de Saxe, inherited everything that was good in his parents, and a great deal that was less commendable. As a mere child of twelve he had insisted on joining the army of Prince Eugene, and had seen rough service in a very strenuous campaign. Two years later he showed such daring on the battle-field that Prince Eugene summoned him and paid him a compliment under the form of a rebuke.
“Young man,” he said, “you must not mistake mere recklessness for valor.”
Before he was twenty he had attained the stature and strength of his royal father; and, to prove it, he in his turn called for a horseshoe, which he twisted and broke in his fingers. He fought on the side of the Russians and Poles, and again against the Turks, everywhere displaying high courage and also genius as a commander; for he never lost his self-possession amid the very blackest danger, but possessed, as Carlyle says, “vigilance, foresight, and sagacious precaution.”
Exceedingly handsome, Maurice was a master of all the arts that pleased, with just a touch of roughness, which seemed not unfitting in so gallant a soldier. His troops adored him and would follow wherever he might choose to lead them; for he exercised over these rude men a magnetic power resembling that of Napoleon in after years. In private life he was a hard drinker and fond of every form of pleasure. Having no fortune of his own, a marriage was arranged for him with the Countess von Loben, who was immensely wealthy; but in three years he had squandered all her money upon his pleasures, and had, moreover, got himself heavily in debt.
It was at this time that he first came to Paris to study military tactics. He had fought hard against the French in the wars that were now ended; but his chivalrous bearing, his handsome person, and his reckless joviality made him at once a universal favorite in Paris. To the perfumed courtiers, with their laces and lovelocks and mincing ways, Maurice de Saxe came as a sort of knight of old–jovial, daring, pleasure-loving. Even his broken French was held to be quite charming; and to see him break a horseshoe with his fingers threw every one into raptures.
No wonder, then, that he was welcomed in the very highest circles. Almost at once he attracted the notice of the Princesse de Conti, a beautiful woman of the blood royal. Of her it has been said that she was “the personification of a kiss, the incarnation of an embrace, the ideal of a dream of love.” Her chestnut hair was tinted with little gleams of gold. Her eyes were violet black. Her complexion was dazzling. But by the king’s orders she had been forced to marry a hunchback–a man whose very limbs were so weakened by disease and evil living that they would often fail to support him, and he would fall to the ground, a writhing, screaming mass of ill-looking flesh.
It is not surprising that his lovely wife should have shuddered much at his abuse of her and still more at his grotesque endearments. When her eyes fell on Maurice de Saxe she saw in him one who could free her from her bondage. By a skilful trick he led the Prince de Conti to invade the sleeping-room of the princess, with servants, declaring that she was not alone. The charge proved quite untrue, and so she left her husband, having won the sympathy of her own world, which held that she had been insulted. But it was not she who was destined to win and hold the love of Maurice de Saxe.
Not long after his appearance in the French capital he was invited to dine with the “Queen of Paris,” Adrienne Lecouvreur. Saxe had seen her on the stage. He knew her previous history. He knew that she was very much of a soiled dove; but when he met her these two natures, so utterly dissimilar, leaped together, as it were, through the indescribable attraction of opposites. He was big and powerful; she was small and fragile. He was merry, and full of quips and jests; she was reserved and melancholy. Each felt in the other a need supplied.
At one of their earliest meetings the climax came. Saxe was not the man to hesitate; while she already, in her thoughts, had made a full surrender. In one great sweep he gathered her into his arms. It appeared to her as if no man had ever laid his hand upon her until that moment. She cried out:
“Now, for the first time in my life, I seem to live!”
It was, indeed, the very first love which in her checkered career was really worthy of the name. She had supposed that all such things were passed and gone, that her heart was closed for ever, that she was invulnerable; and yet here she found herself clinging about the neck of this impetuous soldier and showing him all the shy fondness and the unselfish devotion of a young girl. From this instant Adrienne Lecouvreur never loved another man and never even looked at any other man with the slightest interest. For nine long years the two were bound together, though there were strange events to ruffle the surface of their love.
Maurice de Saxe had been sired by a king. He had the lofty ambition to be a king himself, and he felt the stirrings of that genius which in after years was to make him a great soldier, and to win the brilliant victory of Fontenoy, which to this very day the French are never tired of recalling. Already Louis XV. had made him a marshal of France; and a certain restlessness came over him. He loved Adrienne; yet he felt that to remain in the enjoyment of her witcheries ought not to be the whole of a man’s career.
Then the Grand Duchy of Courland–at that time a vassal state of Poland, now part of Russia–sought a ruler. Maurice de Saxe was eager to secure its throne, which would make him at least semi- royal and the chief of a principality. He hastened thither and found that money was needed to carry out his plans. The widow of the late duke–the Grand Duchess Anna, niece of Peter the Great, and later Empress of Russia–as soon as she had met this dazzling genius, offered to help him to acquire the duchy if he would only marry her. He did not utterly refuse. Still another woman of high rank, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Peter the Great’s daughter, made him very much the same proposal.
Both of these imperial women might well have attracted a man like Maurice de Saxe, had he been wholly fancy-free, for the second of them inherited the high spirit and the genius of the great Peter, while the first was a pleasure-seeking princess, resembling some of those Roman empresses who loved to stoop that they might conquer. She is described as indolent and sensual, and she once declared that the chief good in the world was love. Yet, though she neglected affairs of state and gave them over to favorites, she won and kept the affections of her people. She was unquestionably endowed with the magnetic gift of winning hearts.
Adrienne, who was left behind in Paris, knew very little of what was going on. Only two things were absolutely clear to her. One was that if her lover secured the duchy he must be parted from her. The other was that without money his ambition must be thwarted, and that he would then return to her. Here was a test to try the soul of any woman. It proved the height and the depth of her devotion. Come what might, Maurice should be Duke of Courland, even though she lost him. She gathered together her whole fortune, sold every jewel that she possessed, and sent her lover the sum of nearly a million francs.
This incident shows how absolutely she was his. But in fact, because of various intrigues, he failed of election to the ducal throne of Courland, and he returned to Adrienne with all her money spent, and without even the grace, at first, to show his gratitude. He stormed and raged over his ill luck. She merely soothed and petted him, though she had heard that he had thought of marrying another woman to secure the dukedom. In one of her letters she bursts out with the pitiful exclamation:
I am distracted with rage and anguish. Is it not natural to cry out against such treachery? This man surely ought to know me–he ought to love me. Oh, my God! What are we–what ARE we?
But still she could not give him up, nor could he give her up, though there were frightful scenes between them–times when he cruelly reproached her and when her native melancholy deepened into outbursts of despair. Finally there occurred an incident which is more or less obscure in parts. The Duchesse de Bouillon, a great lady of the court–facile, feline, licentious, and eager for delights–resolved that she would win the love of Maurice de Saxe. She set herself to win it openly and without any sense of shame. Maurice himself at times, when the tears of Adrienne proved wearisome, flirted with the duchess.
Yet, even so, Adrienne held the first place in his heart, and her rival knew it. Therefore she resolved to humiliate Adrienne, and to do so in the place where the actress had always reigned supreme. There was to be a gala performance of Racine’s great tragedy, “Phedre,” with Adrienne, of course, in the title-role. The Duchesse de Bouillon sent a large number of her lackeys with orders to hiss and jeer, and, if possible, to break off the play. Malignantly delighted with her plan, the duchess arrayed herself in jewels and took her seat in a conspicuous stage-box, where she could watch the coming storm and gloat over the discomfiture of her rival.
When the curtain rose, and when Adrienne appeared as Phedre, an uproar began. It was clear to the great actress that a plot had been devised against her. In an instant her whole soul was afire. The queen-like majesty of her bearing compelled silence throughout the house. Even the hired lackeys were overawed by it. Then Adrienne moved swiftly across the stage and fronted her enemy, speaking into her very face the three insulting lines which came to her at that moment of the play:
I am not of those women void of shame, Who, savoring in crime the joys of peace, Harden their faces till they cannot blush!
The whole house rose and burst forth into tremendous applause. Adrienne had won, for the woman who had tried to shame her rose in trepidation and hurried from the theater.
But the end was not yet. Those were evil times, when dark deeds were committed by the great almost with impunity. Secret poisoning was a common trade. To remove a rival was as usual a thing in the eighteenth century as to snub a rival is usual in the twentieth.
Not long afterward, on the night of March 15, 1730, Adrienne Lecouvreur was acting in one of Voltaire’s plays with all her power and instinctive art when suddenly she was seized with the most frightful pains. Her anguish was obvious to every one who saw her, and yet she had the courage to go through her part. Then she fainted and was carried home.
Four days later she died, and her death was no less dramatic than her life had been. Her lover and two friends of his were with her, and also a Jesuit priest. He declined to administer extreme unction unless she would declare that she repented of her theatrical career. She stubbornly refused, since she believed that to be the greatest actress of her time was not a sin. Yet still the priest insisted.
Then came the final moment.
“Weary and revolting against this death, this destiny, she stretched her arms with one of the old lovely gestures toward a bust which stood near by and cried–her last cry of passion:
“‘There is my world, my hope–yes, and my God!'”
The bust was one of Maurice de Saxe.
THE STORY OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART
The royal families of Europe are widely known, yet not all of them are equally renowned. Thus, the house of Romanoff, although comparatively young, stands out to the mind with a sort of barbaric power, more vividly than the Austrian house of Hapsburg, which is the oldest reigning family in Europe, tracing its beginnings backward until they are lost in the Dark Ages. The Hohenzollerns of Prussia are comparatively modern, so far as concerns their royalty. The offshoots of the Bourbons carry on a very proud tradition in the person of the King of Spain, although France, which has been ruled by so many members of the family, will probably never again behold a Bourbon king. The deposed Braganzas bear a name which is ancient, but which has a somewhat tinsel sound.
The Bonapartes, of course, are merely parvenus, and they have had the good taste to pretend to no antiquity of birth. The first Napoleon, dining at a table full of monarchs, when he heard one of them deferentially alluding to the Bonaparte family as being very old and noble, exclaimed:
“Pish! My nobility dates from the day of Marengo!”
And the third Napoleon, in announcing his coming marriage with Mlle. de Montijo, used the very word “parvenu” in speaking of himself and of his family. His frankness won the hearts of the French people and helped to reconcile them to a marriage in which the bride was barely noble.
In English history there are two great names to conjure by, at least to the imaginative. One is Plantagenet, which seems to contain within itself the very essence of all that is patrician, magnificent, and royal. It calls to memory at once the lion- hearted Richard, whose short reign was replete with romance in England and France and Austria and the Holy Land.
But perhaps a name of greater influence is that which links the royal family of Britain today with the traditions of the past, and which summons up legend and story and great deeds of history. This is the name of Stuart, about which a whole volume might be written to recall its suggestions and its reminiscences.
The first Stuart (then Stewart) of whom anything is known got his name from the title of “Steward of Scotland,” which remained in the family for generations, until the sixth of the line, by marriage with Princess Marjory Bruce, acquired the Scottish crown. That was in the early years of the fourteenth century; and finally, after the death of Elizabeth of England, her rival’s son, James VI. of Scotland and I. of England, united under one crown two kingdoms that had so long been at almost constant war.
It is almost characteristic of the Scot that, having small territory, little wealth, and a seat among his peers that is almost ostentatiously humble, he should bit by bit absorb the possessions of all the rest and become their master. Surely, the proud Tudors, whose line ended with Elizabeth, must have despised the “Stewards,” whose kingdom was small and bleak and cold, and who could not control their own vassals.
One can imagine also, with Sir Walter Scott, the haughty nobles of the English court sneering covertly at the awkward, shambling James, pedant and bookworm. Nevertheless, his diplomacy was almost as good as that of Elizabeth herself; and, though he did some foolish things, he was very far from being a fool.
In his appearance James was not unlike Abraham Lincoln–an unkingly figure; and yet, like Lincoln, when occasion required it he could rise to the dignity which makes one feel the presence of a king. He was the only Stuart who lacked anything in form or feature or external grace. His son, Charles I., was perhaps one of the worst rulers that England has ever had; yet his uprightness of life, his melancholy yet handsome face, his graceful bearing, and the strong religious element in his character, together with the fact that he was put to death after being treacherously surrendered to his enemies–all these have combined to make almost a saint of him. There are Englishmen to-day who speak of him as “the martyr king,” and who, on certain days of the year, say prayers that beg the Lord’s forgiveness because of Charles’s execution.
The members of the so-called League of the White Rose, founded to perpetuate English allegiance to the direct line of Stuarts, do many things that are quite absurd. They refuse to pray for the present King of England and profess to think that the Princess Mary of Bavaria is the true ruler of Great Britain. All this represents that trace of sentiment which lingers among the English to-day. They feel that the Stuarts were the last kings of England to rule by the grace of God rather than by the grace of Parliament. As a matter of fact, the present reigning family in England is glad to derive its ancient strain of royal blood through a Stuart–descended on the distaff side from James I., and winding its way through Hanover.
This sentiment for the Stuarts is a thing entirely apart from reason and belongs to the realm of poetry and romance; yet so strong is it that it has shown itself in the most inconsistent fashion. For instance, Sir Walter Scott was a devoted adherent of the house of Hanover. When George IV. visited Edinburgh, Scott was completely carried away by his loyal enthusiasm. He could not see that the man before him was a drunkard and braggart. He viewed him as an incarnation of all the noble traits that ought to hedge about a king. He snatched up a wine-glass from which George had just been drinking and carried it away to be an object of reverence for ever after. Nevertheless, in his heart, and often in his speech, Scott seemed to be a high Tory, and even a Jacobite.
There are precedents for this. The Empress Eugenie used often to say with a laugh that she was the only true royalist at the imperial court of France. That was well enough for her in her days of flightiness and frivolity. No one, however, accused Queen Victoria of being frivolous, and she was not supposed to have a strong sense of humor. None the less, after listening to the skirling of the bagpipes and to the romantic ballads which were sung in Scotland she is said to have remarked with a sort of sigh:
“Whenever I hear those ballads I feel that England belongs really to the Stuarts!”
Before Queen Victoria was born, when all the sons of George III. were childless, the Duke of Kent was urged to marry, so that he might have a family to continue the succession. In resenting the suggestion he said many things, and among them this was the most striking:
“Why don’t you call the Stuarts back to England? They couldn’t possibly make a worse mess of it than our fellows have!”
But he yielded to persuasion and married. From this marriage came Victoria, who had the sacred drop of Stuart blood which gave England to the Hanoverians; and she was to redeem the blunders and tyrannies of both houses.
The fascination of the Stuarts, which has been carried overseas to America and the British dominions, probably began with the striking history of Mary Queen of Scots. Her brilliancy and boldness and beauty, and especially the pathos of her end, have made us see only her intense womanliness, which in her own day was the first thing that any one observed in her. So, too, with Charles I., romantic figure and knightly gentleman. One regrets his death upon the scaffold, even though his execution was necessary to the growth of freedom.
Many people are no less fascinated by Charles II., that very different type, with his gaiety, his good-fellowship, and his easy-going ways. It is not surprising that his people, most of whom never saw him, were very fond of him, and did not know that he was selfish, a loose liver, and almost a vassal of the king of France.
So it is not strange that the Stuarts, with all their arts and graces, were very hard to displace. James II., with the aid of the French, fought hard before the British troops in Ireland broke the backs of both his armies and sent him into exile. Again in 1715–an episode perpetuated in Thackeray’s dramatic story of Henry Esmond –came the son of James to take advantage of the vacancy caused by the death of Queen Anne. But it is perhaps to this claimant’s son, the last of the militant Stuarts, that more chivalrous feeling has been given than to any other.
To his followers he was the Young Chevalier, the true Prince of Wales; to his enemies, the Whigs and the Hanoverians, he was “the Pretender.” One of the most romantic chapters of history is the one which tells of that last brilliant dash which he made upon the coast of Scotland, landing with but a few attendants and rejecting the support of a French army.
“It is not with foreigners,” he said, “but with my own loyal subjects, that I wish to regain the kingdom for my father.”
It was a daring deed, and the spectacular side of it has been often commemorated, especially in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. There we see the gallant prince moving through a sort of military panorama. Most of the British troops were absent in Flanders, and the few regiments that could be mustered to meet him were appalled by the ferocity and reckless courage of the Highlanders, who leaped down like wildcats from their hills and flung themselves with dirk and sword upon the British cannon.
We see Sir John Cope retiring at Falkirk, and the astonishing victory of Prestonpans, where disciplined British troops fled in dismay through the morning mist, leaving artillery and supplies behind them. It is Scott again who shows us the prince, master of Edinburgh for a time, while the white rose of Stuart royalty held once more the ancient keep above the Scottish capital. Then we see the Chevalier pressing southward into England, where he hoped to raise an English army to support his own. But his Highlanders cared nothing for England, and the English–even the Catholic gentry–would not rise to support his cause.
Personally, he had every gift that could win allegiance. Handsome, high-tempered, and brave, he could also control his fiery spirit and listen to advice, however unpalatable it might be.
The time was favorable. The British troops had been defeated on the Continent by Marshal Saxe, of whom I have already written, and by Marshal d’Estrees. George II. was a king whom few respected. He could scarcely speak anything but German. He grossly ill-treated his wife. It is said that on one occasion, in a fit of temper, he actually kicked the prime minister. Not many felt any personal loyalty to him, and he spent most of his time away from England in his other domain of Hanover.
But precisely here was a reason why Englishmen were willing to put up with him. As between him and the brilliant Stuart there would have been no hesitation had the choice been merely one of men; but it was believed that the return of the Stuarts meant the return of something like absolute government, of taxation without sanction of law, and of religious persecution. Under the Hanoverian George the English people had begun to exercise a considerable measure of self-government. Sharp opposition in Parliament compelled him time and again to yield; and when he was in Hanover the English were left to work out the problem of free government.
Hence, although Prince Charles Edward fascinated all who met him, and although a small army was raised for his support, still the unromantic, common-sense Englishmen felt that things were better than in the days gone by, and most of them refused to take up arms for the cause which sentimentally they favored. Therefore, although the Chevalier stirred all England and sent a thrill through the officers of state in London, his soldiers gradually deserted, and the Scots insisted on returning to their own country. Although the Stuart troops reached a point as far south as Derby, they were soon pushed backward into Scotland, pursued by an army of about nine thousand men under the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II.
Cumberland was no soldier; he had been soundly beaten by the French on the famous field of Fontenoy. Yet he had firmness and a sort of overmastering brutality, which, with disciplined troops and abundant artillery, were sufficient to win a victory over the untrained Highlanders.
When the battle came five thousand of these mountaineers went roaring along the English lines, with the Chevalier himself at their head. For a moment there was surprise. The Duke of Cumberland had been drinking so heavily that he could give no verbal orders. One of his officers, however, is said to have come to him in his tent, where he was trying to play cards.
“What disposition shall we make of the prisoners?” asked the officer.
The duke tried to reply, but his utterance was very thick.
“No quarter!” he was believed to say.
The officer objected and begged that such an order as that should be given in writing. The duke rolled over and seized a sheaf of playing-cards. Pulling one out, he scrawled the necessary order, and that was taken to the commanders in the field.
The Highlanders could not stand the cannon fire, and the English won. Then the fury of the common soldiery broke loose upon the country.
There was a reign of fantastic and fiendish brutality. One provost of the town was violently kicked for a mild remonstrance about the destruction of the Episcopalian meeting-house; another was condemned to clean out dirty stables. Men and women were whipped and tortured on slight suspicion or to extract information. Cumberland frankly professed his contempt and hatred of the people among whom he found himself, but he savagely punished robberies committed by private soldiers for their own profit.
“Mild measures will not do,” he wrote to Newcastle.
When leaving the North in July, he said:
“All the good we have done is but a little blood-letting, which has only weakened the madness, but not at all cured it; and I tremble to fear that this vile spot may still be the ruin of this island and of our family.”
Such was the famous battle of Culloden, fought in 1746, and putting a final end to the hopes of all the Stuarts. As to Cumberland’s order for “No quarter,” if any apology can be made for such brutality, it must be found in the fact that the Highland chiefs had on their side agreed to spare no captured enemy.
The battle has also left a name commonly given to the nine of diamonds, which is called “the curse of Scotland,” because it is said that on that card Cumberland wrote his bloodthirsty order.
Such, in brief, was the story of Prince Charlie’s gallant attempt to restore the kingdom of his ancestors. Even when defeated, he would not at once leave Scotland. A French squadron appeared off the coast near Edinburgh. It had been sent to bring him troops and a large supply of money, but he turned his back upon it and made his way into the Highlands on foot, closely pursued by English soldiers and Lowland spies.
This part of his career is in reality the most romantic of all. He was hunted closely, almost as by hounds. For weeks he had only such sleep as he could snatch during short periods of safety, and there were times when his pursuers came within an inch of capturing him. But never in his life were his spirits so high.
It was a sort of life that he had never seen before, climbing the mighty rocks, and listening to the thunder of the cataracts, among which he often slept, with only one faithful follower to guard him. The story of his escape is almost incredible, but he laughed and drank and rolled upon the grass when he was free from care. He hobnobbed with the most suspicious-looking caterans, with whom he drank the smoky brew of the North, and lived as he might on fish and onions and bacon and wild fowl, with an appetite such as he had never known at the luxurious court of Versailles or St.-Germain.
After the battle of Culloden the prince would have been captured had not a Scottish girl named Flora Macdonald met him, caused him to be dressed in the clothes of her waiting-maid, and thus got him off to the Isle of Skye.
There for a time it was impossible to follow him; and there the two lived almost alone together. Such a proximity could not fail to stir the romantic feeling of one who was both a youth and a prince. On the other hand, no thought of love-making seems to have entered Flora’s mind. If, however, we read Campbell’s narrative very closely we can see that Prince Charles made every advance consistent with a delicate remembrance of her sex and services.
It seems to have been his thought that if she cared for him, then the two might well love; and he gave her every chance to show him favor. The youth of twenty-five and the girl of twenty-four roamed together in the long, tufted grass or lay in the sunshine and looked out over the sea. The prince would rest his head in her lap, and she would tumble his golden hair with her slender fingers and sometimes clip off tresses which she preserved to give to friends of hers as love-locks. But to the last he was either too high or too low for her, according to her own modest thought. He was a royal prince, the heir to a throne, or else he was a boy with whom she might play quite fancy-free. A lover he could not be–so pure and beautiful was her thought of him.
These were perhaps the most delightful days of all his life, as they were a beautiful memory in hers. In time he returned to France and resumed his place amid the intrigues that surrounded that other Stuart prince who styled himself James III., and still kept up the appearance of a king in exile. As he watched the artifice and the plotting of these make-believe courtiers he may well have thought of his innocent companion of the Highland wilds.
As for Flora, she was arrested and imprisoned for five months on English vessels of war. After her release she was married, in 1750; and she and her husband sailed for the American colonies just before the Revolution. In that war Macdonald became a British officer and served against his adopted countrymen. Perhaps because of this reason Flora returned alone to Scotland, where she died at the age of sixty-eight.
The royal prince who would have given her his easy love lived a life of far less dignity in the years that followed his return to France. There was no more hope of recovering the English throne. For him there were left only the idle and licentious diversions of such a court as that in which his father lived.
At the death of James III., even this court was disintegrated, and Prince Charles led a roving life under the title of Earl of Albany. In his wanderings he met Louise Marie, the daughter of a German prince, Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg. She was only nineteen years of age when she first felt the fascination that he still possessed; but it was an unhappy marriage for the girl when she discovered that her husband was a confirmed drunkard.
Not long after, in fact, she found her life with him so utterly intolerable that she persuaded the Pope to allow her a formal separation. The pontiff intrusted her to her husband’s brother, Cardinal York, who placed her in a convent and presently removed her to his own residence in Rome.
Here begins another romance. She was often visited by Vittorio Alfieri, the great Italian poet and dramatist. Alfieri was a man of wealth. In early years he divided his time into alternate periods during which he either studied hard in civil and canonical law, or was a constant attendant upon the race-course, or rushed aimlessly all over Europe without any object except to wear out the post-horses which he used in relays over hundreds of miles of road. His life, indeed, was eccentric almost to insanity; but when he had met the beautiful and lonely Countess of Albany there came over him a striking change. She influenced him for all that was good, and he used to say that he owed her all that was best in his dramatic works.
Sixteen years after her marriage her royal husband died, a worn- out, bloated wreck of one who had been as a youth a model of knightliness and manhood. During his final years he had fallen to utter destitution, and there was either a touch of half contempt or a feeling of remote kinship in the act of George III., who bestowed upon the prince an annual pension of four thousand pounds. It showed most plainly that England was now consolidated under Hanoverian rule.
When Cardinal York died, in 1807, there was no Stuart left in the male line; and the countess was the last to bear the royal Scottish name of Albany.
After the prince’s death his widow is said to have been married to Alfieri, and for the rest of her life she lived in Florence, though Alfieri died nearly twenty-one years before her.
Here we have seen a part of the romance which attaches itself to the name of Stuart–in the chivalrous young prince, leading his Highlanders against the bayonets of the British, lolling idly among the Hebrides, or fallen, at the last, to be a drunkard and the husband of an unwilling consort, who in her turn loved a famous poet. But it is this Stuart, after all, of whom we think when we hear the bagpipes skirling “Over the Water to Charlie” or “Wha’ll be King but Charlie?”
THE END