Historic Bubbles. Frederic Leake
of the seventeenth century.
Charles Stuart, Charles II. sits on the throne of England, or rather perambulates about it, for he is a great walker: he and his dogs are always in motion; and his favorite breed of those animals is still known as the King Charles spaniel.
Charles was a witty and a disreputable monarch: one current view of him is that he never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one.
Charles had married Catharine of Braganza a daughter of that John of Braganza who had rescued Portugal from the yoke of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and founded the present dynasty. Catharine bore no children, and the next heir to the crown, was James duke of York brother of Charles. The two brothers were unlike in everything but general worthlessness: Charles was an idler and a scoffer; James a busybody and a devoted—not exactly devout—Roman Catholic. Both were fond of women; but mark the difference! Charles gathered to him handsome ones only; and they were truly handsome, as their portraits still testify. James fell in love so perseveringly with homely ones, that Charles said in his ribald way, that it was the priests who imposed those girls on James as a penance.
Among the damsels who won James’ heart, was Anne daughter of Sir Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon. Now Miss Anne Hyde though respectable, was certainly no match for the blood-royal, for the heir apparent; and James after having gained her affections, sought to jilt her. What led him to think better of it is not clear: stories differ: it is even said that her father himself opposed the marriage out of prudence and politics, just as Cardinal Mazarin prevented Louis XIV. from marrying his niece Olympia with whom the young king was desperately in love. Another legend is that Sir Edward came and knelt before the king and pleaded the cause of his daughter; and Charles told James he must marry that girl. At all events, he did marry her.
Little homely Anne Hyde was now great duchess of York, wife of the heir apparent, prospective queen of England. Among her maids of honor was Arabella daughter of Sir Winston Churchill a country gentlemen of credit and renown. Arabella had a homely face—there is augury in that—but her form was symmetrical. She was a bold horseman—or horsewoman if you insist. James was equally equestrian, so he and Arabella were often companions. One day Miss Churchill had mounted the most unruly animal in the duke’s stables. Her horse reared and kicked and plunged so violently that in spite of her horsemanship, (not horsewomanship,) she was thrown to the ground. James sprang to her aid. He passed his arm around that shapely bodice and looked into that plain face as he raised her up; and his susceptible heart was transfixed once more.
On the 21. August 1670, there was born James Fitzjames, James the son of James and of Arabella Churchill. It was a lusty scion, Churchill through and through; very little of the Stuart perceptible. Leaving the brat to kick and yell and thrive—but don’t forget him—we will consider some other of his relatives—respectable folks all, and moving in the best society, or I should not venture to introduce them to my readers.
Arabella had a brother named John who, you see, was uncle to the little Fitzjames. But for this unclehood and this brotherhood, we probably would never have heard of John. There might have been no Blenheim, no Ramilies, no Oudenard, no Malplaquet, in fine, no duke of Marlborough. James seeing that his morganatic brother-in-law was resolved to be a soldier, sent him to France to serve under Turenne; and John did not waste his time.
Another of the boy’s relations was William of Orange who was his first cousin and married his half sister Mary daughter of James. William is the hero, not of this story which is authentic, but of that fascinating romance Macaulay’s History of England. William was endowed with all the talents and perhaps with one or two of the many virtues attributed to him in that romance. He was as licentious as his uncles Charles and James, and was still keeping his odalisques at the very hour when Macaulay pictures him to us, wringing his hands over his dying wife. He was cruel and even blood-thirsty: the massacre of Glencoe has left a stain on his memory which no romance can wash out. As we shall see presently, he would have put to death this very boy, had he not been held back by a hand which the fate of battle had made stronger than his. He was the last able king of England; but he broke down the power of the crown by impoverishing it. (Blackstone, Book 1. Chapter 8.) He squandered the crown lands not only upon the Dutch adventurers who had followed him from Holland, the Bentincks, the Zulesteins, the Auverquerques, the Keppels who thus fattened and battened upon the English people, but upon more questionable favorites, upon the partners of his private vices, to such an extent that at his death parliament took back what he had given to the women, but the men being politicians found means to keep their share.
In 1685, Charles II. died. He was but 55. He had been temperate in eating and drinking and had taken plenty of exercise, and in the ordinary course of nature, was good for twenty years yet. But he had caught cold and had a touch of vertigo. The doctors came and bled him. It did him no good, because a bleeding never did anybody any good. The next day they came and bled him a second time, and that did him no good, because a second bleeding never did anybody any good. So they came the third day and bled him a third time and that settled him. A Roman Catholic priest was smuggled up the back stairs; the scoffer was shrived and was gathered to his fathers—the Stuarts, the Tudors, the Plantagenets, the Bourbons, the Valois; and his brother James reigned in his stead.
Two years after his accession, James conferred the title of Duke of Berwick on the boy Fitzjames who was now seventeen. It was a barren title no estates annexed; but it was his father’s gift, and with filial piety he cleaved to it his whole life, in preference to other and better endowed patents of nobility which his sword won for him.
He too must be a soldier: the Churchill half of him would have scorned any peaceful course of life; so his father sent him to France to study the art of war in the same school where his uncle John had graduated. When he was nineteen, western Europe being at peace, he got leave of his father to offer his services to the emperor who was fighting the Turks, and was sore pressed by those misbelievers. James gave him a letter to an Irishman in the imperial service, named Taft who had held the rank of colonel, and had just been made a general. Taft had influence enough with the commander-in-chief, the duke of Lorraine, to give to Berwick the regiment he had left.
The Turks lay encamped on the spot where a hundred years before, they had won the first battle of Mohacs, and what still added to their self-confidence, was that the duke of Lorraine, in obedience to the emperor’s orders, had attacked their position and been repulsed; and now scorning to act longer on the defensive, they marched upon the Christians. A bloody struggle followed in which victory was wrested from the hand of the Moslem. Berwick in his memoirs says that the Imperialists lost only ten thousand men—only ten thousand men! How many Turks fell in that dreadful day, he does not report. Perhaps like a good Catholic he thought that misbelievers, especially dead misbelievers were not worth the counting. He says next to nothing about his own share in the battle; but from the fact that he was immediately promoted, it may be inferred that the boy did not belie the blood of Churchill in all that carnage.
He did not remain long in the Emperor’s service. His father now needed the aid of every one of the few friends that were left him; and Berwick returned to England. We all know that James lost his crown by undertaking to reëstablish the Roman Catholic religion in England; but he was by no means the natural fool for thinking of such a thing that Macaulay represents him to be.
In the whole history of national religions there is no other instance of such inconstancy as had been shown by the English in that and the preceding century. At the beck of Henry VIII., they renounced the pope and all his works. But Henry told them that he himself was now pope in England, so they still cleaved to popery: they bowed the knee to a Cockney pope instead of to an Italian pope. In the reign of Henry’s son Edward VI., they went over body and soul to protestantism, priests and all. Then under his sister Mary, Bloody Mary, they all hurried back to the Mass and the Breviary. I know there were some exceptions, John Rogers and all that, but they were too few to invalidate the rule. In the next reign, that of Elizabeth, they changed their creed the fourth time. The Venitian ambassador at the court of Elizabeth, wrote home that the English would turn Turks or Jews to save their persons or their pockets. Nor did this pliability of faith end there. James himself remembered the day when, at the preaching of a few saints in jack-boots and spurs, half of England stopped going decorously to church, and repeating devoutly