The battle of Naseby was, perhaps, the anticipative preventive of an English “French Revolution.” The difference between Cromwell’s Ironsides and the gay Frondeurs measures the difference between the English people and the French.

Charles I. aimed to be in England what Louis XIV. was in France. Both fully believed in the divine right of Kings; both quoted as their favorite text of Scripture, “Where the word of a King is there is power; and who may say unto him ‘What doest thou?’” But Louis dealt with the fickle Frondeurs and Charles with Cromwell’s Ironsides; and this racial difference had as divergent results—absolutism for Louis le Grand and the block for Charles Stuart.

There will always be difference of opinion as to Cromwell’s place in history. Was he liberator or tyrant, Christian ruler or barbarously fanatic despot? There can be but one opinion as to the injustice of the trial, condemnation, and death of Charles. The Rump Parliament was certainly not representative of England. It was Cromwell’s creature as arbitrarily as ever the Star Chamber was Charles’.

“Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, and greater criminals?”—Byron.

But as a force in favor of constitutional government and civic liberty, however abused in immediate practice; and as a threatening protest against the abuse of power in high places; and as a veiled challenge of defiance to every absolute monarch—the battle fought June 14, 1645, at Naseby, Northamptonshire,[115] between the Royalists under Charles I. and the Parliamentarians under Fairfax must ever be considered a victory decisive and for all time advantageous.
Queen Henrietta Maria.

Henrietta Maria was the daughter of Henry IV. of France, the first Bourbon, and his second wife, Maria de Medici. At the age of fifteen she was married to Charles I. of England; and her best and happiest years as wife, mother, and Queen were spent in England.

In this princess many of the leading Italian, French and English characteristics were met and happily blended. Her dark, lithe beauty (as shown in her portrait by Van Dyke), her musical ability, instrumental and vocal, her fiery-hearted fidelity to the religion of her mother, were, perhaps, her heritage from sunny Italy; the France of Richelieu might, as an environment, conduce favorably to that diplomatic waywardness which, in early years, invariably won for the sweet girl-wife whatsoever her heart might desire; but perhaps from England, land of realism, chilly fogs, and Cromwellian barbarity, she imbibed her sturdy spirit of fortitude and heroic endurance of sorrow.

“To bear is to conquer our fate”, and to refuse to bear and to apparently end all by self-destruction, is to fail to conquer our fate.

The hopes and promises of religion are of inestimable value as an aid in the endurance of sorrows. When the dread culmination of all earthly fears and horrors—the beheading of Charles I.—clashed full upon the widowed heart of Queen Henrietta Maria, she withdrew at once from the court of Paris and sought solace in seclusion and prayer. The convent, not the court; the divine, not the human; the hopes and promises of religion as red-glowed in the sanctuary of a Carmelite convent[116] chapel, held the balm that soothed her wounded soul in that awful culminant woe.

Which is better—to bear or to fail to bear? to hope and endure or despair and die? to pray and bless God saying, The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord, or to wither away in cursing and impotent hate? to believe and grow strongly peaceful in the belief that God is good and all is for the best; that all is little and short that passes away with time; that God’s explanation shall exultingly explain forever and ever—or to doubt, negative, deny, and bitterly live and despairingly die? Even as a matter of merely human wisdom, it is well to believe in the hopes and promises of religion.

The monastic sanctuaries that arise wherever the Catholic Church flourishes, and that lure into their prayerful solitudes the “hearts that are heavy with losses and weary with dragging the crosses too heavy for mortals to bear” are surely indicative of a far higher and happier state of society than that whose godless defiance finds suicidal expression in the insidious drug, the deadly acid, the desperate bullet.

The houses of Euthanasia of the near Socialistic future are surely as stones unto bread in comparison with the monastic sanctuaries of the Middle Ages.
Wonders of Portraits.

How wonderful is the art which can impress upon canvas and so preserve from generation to generation and from century to century, a lifelike presentment of men and women whose flesh and blood realities have long since mouldered dust with dust! The canvas endures; the man dies?—Ah, no! he has but shuffled off the earth-garment and left it earth with earth; he lives.

The Van Dyke portraits of Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I. and the children of Charles I. are mutely eloquent. The well-known[117] picture, “Baby Stuart”, a detail from the group, “Children of Charles I.” suggests the high tide of love and happiness in the life of Queen Henrietta Maria. She was then surrounded by everything that heart could desire,—wealth, honor, power, a husband’s unbounded love and confidence and three beautiful and most promising children. They were Mary, who later married William, Prince of Orange; Charles, who, at the Restoration, became the “Merry Monarch” of England, and James, the baby Stuart, who later became the unfortunate James II., the monarch who lost his crown, and whose daughter Mary, wedded to her cousin, William, Prince of Orange, son of that sister Mary, who, in the portrait, stands at his side, abetted the deposition of her father and wore his crown.

There is something eloquently pathetic in the portraits of men and women who have fallen victims to a tragic fate. The principle of contrast is, doubtless, here at work, setting side by side with the hour of portrayal that other hour of bitter death. Marie Antoinette and her children, as fixed upon canvas by the court painter, Madame Vigee LeBrun, derive their rich tonal qualities—warm grays and reds, their charm of evanescence, their magically somber fascination, from the shadows of the Conciergerie and the guillotine.

The portrait of Charles I. as painted by Van Dyke, must ever suggest to the thoughtful student of history that scene, disgraceful alike to the English nation and to human nature which took place on the scaffold just outside Whitehall Palace.

Yes; there are two sides to every question, and one is a ruler exercising arbitrary power and impregnated with belief in the divine right of kings and claiming it his prerogative to break up his parliament and govern alone; the other is an assembly of men, nominally a parliament, so narrowly fanatic and steeped in human hate that they demanded as condition under which they would agree to levy taxes for Charles I. to use in aid of[118] Protestant Holland, that he should first order every Catholic priest in his own realm to be put to death and the property of all Catholics to be confiscated. Charles refused. This side of the cause of the rupture between Charles I. and his Parliament has not the historic prominence of the other side. Why? Not very hard to tell why if one considers attentively the writers of the history of that period.

“I hope to meet my end with calmness. Do not let us speak of the men into whose hands I have fallen. They thirst for my blood, they shall have it. God’s will be done, I give Him thanks. I forgive them all sincerely, but let us say no more about them”—these words addressed to Bishop Juxon by Charles a few days before his death attest the inherent nobility of his nature. Whatever the life of Charles I. may have been, his death was kingly; and if death is the echo of life then, too, his life must have been vocal with virtues. But what virtue can outshine or even illumine the black chaos of creed-fanaticism, odium, obloquy? What power can break up and restore to their original settings the half-truths, untruths, errors and lies glitteringly crystalized in history, drama, story and song? Does time right ancient wrongs, readjust and make-whole torn, century-scattered truths? We dream so; we say so; but at deepest heart we whisper No.

With unruffled calmness, with dignity, with kingly grace, Charles I. stepped from the opening of what had been in happier days his banqueting hall and advanced upon the scaffold. In the words of Agnes Strickland:

“It was past 1 o’clock before the grisly attendants and apparatus of the scaffold were ready. Colonel Hacker led the king through his former banqueting hall, one of the windows of which had originally been contrived to support stands for public pageantries; it had been taken out and led to the platform raised in the street. The noble bearing of the King as he[119] stepped on the scaffold, his beaming eyes and high expression, were noticed by all who saw him. He looked on all sides for his people, but dense masses of soldiery only presented themselves far and near. He was out of hearing of any persons but Juxon and Herbert, save those who were interested in his destruction. The soldiers preserved a dead silence; this time they did not insult him. The distant populace wept, and occasionally raised mournful cries in blessings and prayers for him. The king uttered a short speech, to point out that every institute of the original constitution of England had been subverted with the sovereign power. While he was speaking someone touched the axe, which was laid enveloped in black crepe on the block. The king turned round hastily and exclaimed, ‘Have a care of the axe. If the edge is spoiled it will be the worse for me.’

“The king put up his flowing hair under a cap; then, turning to the executor asked, ‘Is any of my hair in the way?’ ‘I beg your majesty to push it more under your cap,’ replied the man, bowing. The bishop assisted his royal master to do so and observed to him: ‘There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and troublesome, is yet a very short one. Consider, it will carry you a great way—even from earth to heaven.’ ‘I go,’ replied the king, ‘from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown.’

“He unfastened his cloak and took off the medallion of the order of the Garter. The latter he gave to Juxon, saying with emphasis, ‘Remember!’ Beneath the medallion of St. George was a secret spring which removed a plate ornamented with lilies, under which was a beautiful miniature of his Henrietta. The warning word, which has caused many historical surmises, evidently referred to the fact that he only had parted with the portrait of his beloved wife at the last moment of his existence. He then took off his coat and put on his cloak, and pointing to[120] the block, said to the executioner: ‘Place it so that it will not shake.’ ‘It is firm, sir,’ replied the man. ‘I shall say a short prayer,’ said the king, ‘and when I hold out my hand thus, strike.’ The king stood in profound meditation, said a few words to himself, looked upward on the heavens, then knelt and laid his head on the block. In about a minute he stretched out his hands, and his head was severed at one blow.”
Sorrow.

News travelled slowly in the days of long ago; and the trial, death and burial of Charles I. were over long before intelligence of the dire happenings in England had been carried into France. Queen Henrietta Maria, then in the Louvre Palace, Paris, had just received into her motherly arms her second son, James, who had successfully passed through the belligerent lines and reached safety in Paris. This joy was soon dulled into woe.

Ominous whispers among the Louvre circle and pitying glances caused the queen to make inquiries. The worst was soon told. The queen had expected imprisonment, perhaps even deposition and exile, but death, the official beheading of an English sovereign—had not once entered into her mind as among the possibilities. The queen sat silent and tearless among her sympathizing English attendants. Pere Gamache approached. She received him apathetically. Her aunt, the Duchess de Vendome, took her hand and held it caressingly—but the Queen seemed in a state of frozen woe; no moan, no sigh, no tear. Pere Gamache withdrew unobserved and searching through the royal chambers he found the little Princess Henriette, the four-year-old idol of the once happy Stuart home. Leading the child gently by the hand, he returned to the scene of grief.

At the touch of baby hands, the impress of childish kisses,[121] the unhappy Queen seemed slowly to come back to life even as it was, and clasping her little daughter in rapturous tenderness to her breast she wept. Long and wildly she wept and the frightened child weeping responsively and clinging helplessly to her bosom saved her at last to sanity and to heroic endurance.

Tennyson has beautifully expressed this power of childish love and helplessness to save a mother from despair:

Home they brought her warrior dead;

She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry,

All her maidens, watching said,

“She must weep or she will die.”

Then they praised him,............