The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863. Various
be able to mention something to his credit. Instead of being jealous of his son, or desiring to keep him in ignorance of affairs, he early determined to train him to business. According to Clarendon, he said that he wished to "unboy him." Therefore he conferred high military offices upon him before he had completed his fifteenth year; and sent him to the West of England, to be the nominal head of the Western Association. Charles II. had no legitimate children, and so he could not have any quarrels with a Prince of Wales. He was fond of his numerous bastards, and, like an affectionate royal father, provided handsomely for them at the public-expense. What more could a father do, situated as that father was, and always in want of his people's money? Some of them were not his sons,—Monmouth, the best beloved of them all, being the son of Robert Sidney, a brother of the renowned Algernon, a fact that partially excuses the harsh conduct of James II. toward his nominal nephew. James II. had no legitimate son until the last year of his reign; but his two eldest daughters treated him far worse than any sovereign of the Hanoverian line was ever used by a son. They were most respectable women, and their deficiency in piety has worked well for the world; but it must ever be repugnant to humanity to regard the conduct of Mary and Anne with respect. No wonder that people called Mary the modern Tullia. Mary II. died young, and childless; and Queen Anne, though a most prolific wife, and but fifty-one at her death, survived all her children. Anne believed that her children's deaths were sent in punishment of her unfilial conduct; and she would have restored her nephew, the Pretender, to the British throne, but that the Jacobites were the silliest political creatures that ever triumphed in the how-not-to-do-it business, and could not even hold their mouths open for the rich and ripened fruit to drop into them.
The first of the English Stuarts, James I., is suspected of having allowed his jealousy of his eldest son, the renowned Prince Henry, to carry him to the extent of child-murder. The Stuarts are called the Fated Line, and it is certain that none of their number, from Robert II.—who got the Scottish throne in virtue of his veins containing a portion of the blood of the Bruce, and so regalized the family, which, like the Bruces, was of Norman origin, and originally Fitzalan by name—to Charles Edward, and the Cardinal York, who died but yesterday, as it were, but had a wonderful run of bad luck. They had capital cards, but they knew not how to play them. With them, to play was to lose, and the most fortunate of their number were those kings who played as little as they could, such as James I. and Charles II. Those who lost the most were those who played the hardest, as Charles I. and his second son, James II. Yet the family was a clever one, with strong traits, both of character and talent, that ought to have made it the most successful of ruling races, and would have made it so, if its chiefs could have learned to march with the times. They had to contend, in Scotland, with one of the fiercest and most unprincipled aristocracies that ever tried the patience and traversed the purposes of monarchs who really aimed at the good government of their people; and the idiosyncrasy contracted during more than two centuries of Scottish rule clung to the family after it went to England, and found itself living under altogether a different state of things. What was virtue in Scotland became vice in England; and the ultra-monarchists, who came into existence not long after James I. succeeded to Elizabeth, helped to spoil the Stuarts. Both James and his successor were dominated by Scotch traditions, and supposed that they were contending with men who had the same end in view that had been regarded by the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the Ruthvens, the Lindsays, and others of the old Scotch baronage. What helped to deceive them was this,—that their opponents in England, like the opponents of their ancestors in Scotland, were aristocrats; and they supposed, that, as aristocratical movements in their Northern kingdom had always been subversive of order and peace, the same kind of movements would produce similar results in their Southern kingdom. They could not understand that one aristocracy may differ much from another, and that, while in Scotland the interest of the people, or rather of the whole nation, required the exaltation of the kingly power, in England it was that exaltation which was most to be feared. Sufficient allowance has not been made for the Stuarts in this respect, little regard being paid to the effect of the family's long training at home, which had rendered hostility to the nobility second nature to it. Had the Stuarts been the supporters of liberal ideas in England, their conduct would have given the lie to every known principle of human action. As their distrust of aristocracy rendered them despotically disposed, because the Scotch aristocracy had been the most lawless of mankind, so did they become attached to the Church of England because of the tyranny they had seen displayed by the Church of Scotland, the most illiberal ecclesiastical body, in those times, that men had ever seen, borne with, or suffered from. James I. and his grandson Charles II. had their whole conduct colored, and dyed in the wool, too, by their recollections of the odious treatment to which they had been subjected by a harsh and intolerant clergy. They had not the magnanimity to overlook, in the day of their power, what they had suffered in the day of their weakness.
James I. undoubtedly disliked his eldest son, and was jealous of him; but it is by no means clear that he killed him, or caused him to be killed. He used to say of him, "What! will he bury me alive?" He ordered that the court should not go into mourning for Henry, a circumstance that makes in his favor, as murderers are apt to affect all kinds of hypocrisy in regard to their victims, and to weep in weeds very copiously. Yet his conduct may have been a refinement of hypocrisy, and, though a coward in the common acceptation of the word, James had much of that peculiar kind of hardihood which enables its possessor to treat commonly received ideas with contempt. His conduct in "The Great Oyer of Poisoning" was most extraordinary, it must be allowed, and is not reconcilable with innocence; but it does not follow that the guilt which the great criminals in that business could have established as against James related only to the death of Henry. It bore harder upon the King than even that crime could have borne, and must have concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have ears that are less delicate. It was in Somerset's power to explain James's conduct respecting some things that puzzled his contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants; but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that might have led to their ascendency thirty years earlier than it came to pass in the reign of his son. James was capable of almost any crime or baseness; but in the matter of poisoning his eldest son he is entitled to the Scotch verdict of Not Proven.
Whether James killed his son or not, it is certain that the Prince's death was a matter of extreme importance. Henry was one of those characters who are capable of giving history a twist that shall last forever. He had a fondness for active life, was very partial to military pursuits, and was friendly to those opinions which the bigoted chiefs of Austria and Bavaria were soon to combine to suppress. Henry would have come to the throne in 1625, had he lived, and there seems no reason to doubt that he would have anticipated the part which Gustavus Adolphus played a few years later. He would have made himself the champion of Protestantism, and not the less readily because his sister, the Electress-Palatine and Winter-Queen of Bohemia, would have been benefited by his successes in war. Bohemia might have become the permanent possession of the Palatine, and Protestantism have maintained its hold on Southern Germany, had Henry lived and reigned, and had his conduct as a king justified the hopes and expectations that were created by his conduct as a prince. The House of Austria would in that case have had a very different career from that which it has had since 1625, when Ferdinand II. was preparing so much evil for the future of Europe. Had Henry returned from Continental triumphs at the head of a great and an attached army, what could have prevented him from establishing arbitrary power in his insular dominions? His brother failed to make himself absolute, because he had no army, and was personally unpopular; but Henry would have had an army, and one, too, that would have stood high in English estimation, because of what it had done for the English name and the Protestant religion in Germany,—and Henry himself would have been popular, as a successful military man is sure to be in any country. Pym and Hampden would have found him a very different man to deal with from his foolish brother, who had all the love of despotism that man can have, but little of that kind of ability which enables a sovereign to reign despotically. Charles I. had no military capacity or taste, or he would have taken part in the Thirty Years' War, and in that way, and through the assistance of his army, have accomplished his domestic purpose. His tyranny was of a hard, iron character, unrelieved by a single ray of glory, but aggravated by much disgrace from the ill working of his foreign policy;