Читать книгу God's Playthings - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

Table of Contents

The Earl of Strafford

“Certainly never any man acted such a part, in such a theatre, with more wisdom, constancy and eloquence, with greater reason, judgment and temper, and with a better grace in all his words and gestures, than this great and excellent person did.”–Whitelock on the trial of Strafford.

This was a man who in his own time was great and fell to dishonoured death, leaving a brilliant memory, but one neither respected nor praised; a King raised him, used him and forsook him, a people judged him, condemned him, and put him to death. Great events followed; the nation shook and changed. The King himself was swept away by that same power to which he had in vain sacrificed his minister, a greater than the King ruled England and men forgot the Earl of Strafford save to execrate his policies.

But they who come home crowned with laurel from the wars the popular heroes of an hour are not always the only saviours of their country, and they who flatter the people do not always serve them best. History is a hard, often an unreflective, judge; her verdict, dictated by the passion of a moment, lasts too often for centuries.

Judging a man by his inner spirit, his desires, the use he makes of great abilities, pitying a man for his misfortunes, his bitter death, those English born may well give a little gratitude to this Englishman who had ever England in his heart.

Thomas Wentworth was of an ancient and noble family of Yorkshire, powerful by intellect, Puritan by tradition, strong by courage and self-belief, above all things deeply desirous of rendering that service to his country which is the way that most readily appeals to a man of an active complexion of satisfying that almost unconscious yearning for glory that is the sign of a great spirit. Mere personal ambition is a proof of either meanness or madness, and the self-seeking of either insanity or vanity has never attained any but a brittle fame and a hollow achievement; if a man is to even contemplate the performance of mighty deeds, he must have some mightiness within him.

Strong enthusiasm, unless it be of the headlong useless kind, is ever joined to that tincture of melancholy which comes from viewing the contrasting apathy of the rest of mankind, and for the first years of his opening understanding Thomas Wentworth was silent, reserved in matters political, given to reflect and observe more than to speak or act.

He had the usual education of a gentleman, studied at Cambridge, travelled in Europe, became Sir Thomas and member for Yorkshire before he was twenty-one.

It was the beginning of the power of parliaments, the beginning of that temper in the people which was to later furnish the extraordinary spectacle of a nation ruling its own kings and retaining a monarchy as a mere ornament to that independence which displayed undisguised is likely to be too stern an object to please a people full of levity and love of show. This party was represented by the Opposition that had galled and restricted the first Charles since his accession; he, however, rather disliked than feared them, and did not doubt that his authority would quell their republican principles.

With these men, among whom was John Pym and afterwards a nobler patriot, John Hampden, Sir Thomas took his seat; he went not into extremes against the court, but conducted himself moderately; he became Custos Rotulorum for the West Riding; presently the king was advised to make him Sheriff of York that he might be disqualified as a Parliamentary candidate; next he was imprisoned for refusing to pay a forced loan imposed by Charles; it seemed that he was committed beyond withdrawal to the Opposition, daily more daring; and that he was to be one of that band of men, firm willed and single minded, who discovered in an absolute monarchy a menace to the general good; but Wentworth did not see with them; tradition was strong in him, his imagination glorified loyalty; he saw in the king an instrument for procuring the greatness of the people; he saw a crisis approaching, a struggle drawing nearer, he chose his side, knowing perhaps that it was bound to lose, but seeing at least a chance for his own dormant abilities to strengthen and exalt a weakening institution. In 1628 the Duke of Buckingham was stabbed to the heart by one of those Puritans who were resolved that all pertaining to Kingship was fatal to their country’s peace, and in that year Thomas Wentworth took the place of the murdered favourite and became, with Laud of Canterbury, chief adviser to the King.

It was supposed by his former friends that he had covered himself with immortal infamy by his desertion of the popular party for that of the court, and their censure has been often echoed, it being assumed that because the cause he espoused was unsuccessful he wasted his genius in serving it; but in 1628 Sir Thomas may have hoped to make England as great as did Cromwell afterwards, and there was no prophet to tell him his judgment was deceived.

A personal friendship rose between him and the stately, formal King with whose traits he had much in common. Charles, grateful to the genius that took the place of Buckingham’s careless talents, created him in one year baron, viscount, and Lord President of the Council of the North.

The Puritan party viewed his rise with peculiar hatred; so hard is it for even just men to stifle the claims of party and see any good in that cause which is not their own.

“You have left us,” said John Pym, “but we will not leave you while your head is on your shoulders.”

In 1633 Wentworth was made Lord Deputy of Ireland, and endeavoured to reduce order into that vexed and discontented country by measures which were abused as despotic, but which were necessary to a man occupied with great schemes. England could never be a great empire while Ireland was an independent kingdom; his claim of Connaught only anticipated the inevitable, and if the army he was so abused for raising could have been kept together under his direction, the crown of England might have been saved. As far as time permitted, he introduced social benefits into the wretched land and encouraged the linen industry by planting flax.

But he was too late, perhaps too impetuous, blinded by his own genius for command into overlooking the steady rise of the democracy; he himself described his policy as “thorough.” Had he been allowed the time, he would have made a notable thing of this policy; but the tide was against him, and bore him sharply out to ruin.

Private malice, not his own faults, brought about his downfall, and he was thrown by a misuse of the law as wanton as any tyranny that could be brought against him. In 1639 John Pym carried out his threat and impeached him of high treason; Wentworth, newly created Lord Strafford, was committed to the Tower, and the outward disgrace and real glory of the man began.

It was one of the most memorable of all state trials, and lacked no element of the tragic, the strange, the terrible, or the dramatic.

The prisoner was he who for over ten years had been the greatest man in the three kingdoms; the principal accuser was one who had been the closest friend of the man he accused; the judges were eighty peers of the realm, the witnesses the two Houses. A King who loved and a Queen who hated the accused were present. The prisoner conducted his own defence, and outside beyond the doors of Westminster Hall the first murmurs of the growing civil war were beginning to rise and swell.

Sir Anthony Van Dyck painted Lord Strafford as a dark, handsome man of a robust type dictating to his secretary; the picture shows a personality such as is in accordance with what we know of the man, and when looking at the proud, half-frowning face it is easy to imagine how he stood during his trial, pale, composed, erect, scornful of them, seeing very surely the axe ahead, having no trust save in the sad-eyed King at whose ear the Bourbon Queen whispered hatred of him, yet using all his magnificence of eloquence to save himself as one who is conscious that his life is worth defending.

Thirteen accusers, who relieved each other, plied him with questions for seventeen days, and he answered them all with unshaken judgment, calm and grace, unaided, unpitied. John Pym’s hatred spurred his enemies on, and Lord Strafford must have tasted the bitterest of all humiliation when he looked to where sat his friend Charles Stewart, not daring to lift a hand to save him–and he had hoped to make his King great indeed.

The man on trial for his life and honours and the King in his regal seat exchanged many a deep look across the commoners who were the masters of both–“he trusts me, and I am helpless” was like a dagger in the heart of Charles.

By his side always sat the Queen, Mary of France, black-eyed, small, in satin and pearls, ready with her hand on his wrist, her voice in his ear: “Do not rouse the people–let Strafford go—”

She had always hated him; she hated any who endeavoured to share her dominion over her husband; she began, too, to be afraid of the people, and as she was of the blood royal of France, a breed that could not understand concession, she and her priests urged the King into further tyrannical measures; first, let Strafford go: he had devised the unpopular laws; if his death would appease the people, let them glut in his blood and keep their complaints from the ear of his Majesty.

So the Queen; but the King loved Strafford, who had served him to this end of ruin, and when he looked across at the dauntless figure pleading his cause to ears deaf with prejudice, he vowed in his heart that his minister should not die, and cursed the barking commoners who forced him there to witness the humiliation of this his faithful servant.

The genius of one man was triumphant over the malice of many. Strafford argued away every charge raised against him. A bill of attainder was then brought forward, hurried on, and passed on April 26th, a week after he had closed his splendid defence.

The King, desperate and seeing his own throne shaking, yet had the resolution to refuse his assent; he had promised his protection to Strafford and would not give way.

The whole nation rose to demand the blood of Thomas Wentworth; Laud was already in the Tower, the Puritan party dominant; the fallen minister had no friend save the King.

His ambitious, lofty, and reserved spirit tasted great agony while he waited through the long days of early spring, tramping his chamber in the Tower–he who had hoped to make England great–and here was England howling for his life and honours … here was John Pym and his fanatic followers triumphant.

“What is left? Can the great spirit rise to the great crisis? Having proudly lived, can I proudly die? Can I still serve England–now?”

The King was firm, and public feeling rose to a panic of excitement. Revolution was on the point of shaking the very palace. The Queen, with a baseness doubly vile in a woman, used her arts to wrest death from Strafford for her husband, vowed with tears to flee to France. The Bishop of Lincoln urged that the needs and desires of the nation were more than a mere private promise.

But the King was firm; he would not sign the death warrant of Strafford.

Then the Queen, potent for mischief, wrought on the King, since he was obstinate on that point, to save his servant by violent means. The distracted Charles took her fatal advice and endeavoured to seize the Tower of London by force by means of the troops lately raised by the Queen.

This attempt on the keys of the kingdom threw the nation, already in a ferment, into a tumult of wrath and fear, and Lord Strafford was lost.

The wildfire of party zeal inflamed men into believing anything desperate of the King; thrice the members of the House of Commons fled on a cracking of the floor, thinking they had trod again over gunpowder as in the former reign. There was nothing too monstrous to be stated, nor too extravagant to be believed.

But the King would not sign the death warrant of his friend and servant; he was supported by the Bishop of London, who bade him listen to his conscience rather than to the fierce demands of party. Amid all the press of turning strife one man was calm–the prisoner in the Tower who saw every day how he had failed in his scheme of government and how he had been the means of embroiling the King with the people instead of establishing a great man over a great nation and making a light in Europe of Charles Stewart.

Of all bitter failures, what can be more bitter than that of a great statesman who hugely stakes and hugely loses beyond redemption, beyond hope? The proud dark-faced man who had stood so high and dreamt so daringly had his vigils of anguish during those long May days and nights in the old Tower already darkened with noble blood and the memory of splendid sufferers. He had lost everything but his life, and that hung on the promise of the King. My lord did not doubt that his master would keep that promise; but what was mere life to a man who only valued existence as it meant use, power, achievement?

He who had given the King and England his best now gave all left to him. On one of those awakening days of spring, when even in the Tower there were trees bursting into leaf, glimpses of cloud-flecked blue, bars of sunshine across the cold walls and sounds from the wide river of music and merry-making, Lord Strafford wrote to the King, asking, for the sake of the peace of England, to be left to his fate.

In these words he concluded his noble letter: “My consent will more acquit you to God than all the world can do besides. To you I can resign the life of this world with all imaginable cheerfulness.” The King gave way, but with no abatement of his anguish, since he justly felt that such a request was but another reason for him to keep his word.

He could not, when he had consented, sign the warrant himself, so this was done by four lords, and he sent a message entreating mercy of the peers, or at least a delay; but there was no pity in England for Lord Strafford, nor for the King.

The worst half of the tragedy was his; he never forgot nor shook his conscience free of what he had done. When he came to his own agony and bent his sad head to the block he looked at Juxon, that same bishop who had been advocate for Strafford, and said, “Remember,” and it was believed that the terrible whisper referred to the forsaken friend who had died the same death eight years before.

At the moment he fell into a kind of apathy in the midst of the rejoicing faction who had their way at last.

Lord Strafford prepared for death; he was in the full vigour of life, of a worldly temper, proud and ambitious; the warm days were full of the keen joy of life. He tasted to the utmost the sharpness of the struggle between flesh and spirit. When he heard from the written paper the actual words of the King formally condemning him he was for a moment broken with emotion and overcome at thought of the friendship that had failed so miserably; he, beloved of the King, was to die an attainted man, a death humiliating and shameful, branded as a traitor.

He struggled to control his haughty spirit, to subdue the flesh that clung to lovely life, but always before his eyes were the ripening green, the sweet early weather, the sounds from the river, and it was not easy.

The execution was hurried on; on the 12th of May he went to his death in black satins like the great gentleman he was; as he left the gate Archbishop Laud, his one-time coadjutor, now his fellow-prisoner, met him, and he went on his knee to receive the blessing of one who was to so quickly follow him to the scaffold, then on between his guards silent and scornful like the leader of them all, while on his face were the low-breathed air and the early sunshine, and in his ears the calls of the birds and the swish of the river rippling hurriedly under the fortress walls.

Many men have died for England in many ways, none under circumstances more difficult and bitter than this proud man who sank to rest upon the block that May day while his sick, haunted King waited in the great palace for the awful news of the irrecoverable.