Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862

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The next one is taken from a student-song book, and was probably
written in 1814:--

THE CANTEEN.

Just help me, Lottie, as I spring;
My arm is feeble, see,--
I still must have it in a sling;
Be softly now with me!
But do not let the canteen slip,--
Here, take it first, I pray,--
For when that's broken from my lip,
All joys will flow away.

"And why for that so anxious?--pshaw!
It is not worth a pin:
The common glass, the bit of straw,
And not a drop within!"
No matter, Lottie, take it out,--
'T is past your reckoning:
Yes, look it round and round about,--
There drank from it--my King!

By Leipsic near, if you must know,--
'T was just no children's play,--
A ball hit me a grievous blow,
And in the crowd I lay;
Nigh death, they bore me from the scene,
My garments off they fling,
Yet held I fast by my canteen,--
There drank from it--my King!

For once our ranks in passing through
He paused,--we saw his face;
Around us keen the volleys flew,
He calmly kept his place.
He thirsted,--I could see it plain,
And courage took to bring
My old canteen for him to drain,--
He drank from it--my King!

He touched me on the shoulder here,
And said, "I thank thee, friend,
Thy liquor gives me timely cheer,--
Thou didst right well intend."
O'erjoyed at this, I cried aloud,
"O comrades, who can bring
Canteen like this to make him proud?--
There drank from it--my King!"

That old canteen shall no one have,
The best of treasures mine;
Put it at last upon my grave,
And under it this line:
"He fought at Leipsic, whom this green
Is softly covering;
Best household good was his canteen,--
There drank from it--his King!"

And finally, a song for all the campaigns of life:--

Morning-red! morning-red!
Lightest me towards the dead!
Soon the trumpets will be blowing,
Then from life must I be going,
I, and comrades many a one.

Soon as thought, soon as thought,
Pleasure to an end is brought;
Yesterday upon proud horses,--
Shot to-day, our quiet corses
Are to-morrow in the grave.

And how soon, and how soon,
Vanish shape and beauty's noon!
Of thy cheeks a moment vaunting,
Like the milk and purple haunting,--
Ah, the roses fade away!

And what, then, and what, then,
Is the joy and lust of men?
Ever caring, ever getting,
From the early morn-light fretting
Till the day is past and gone.

Therefore still, therefore still
I content me, as God will:
Fighting stoutly, nought shall shake me:
For should death itself o'ertake me,
Then a gallant soldier dies.

FROUDE'S HENRY THE EIGHTH.

The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a
charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their
advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed
upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries,
have been set aside, and others of a widely different character
pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper,
and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to
gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer
of the very highest and best class,--as the man who alone thoroughly
understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument
to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose
members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow
the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the
personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the
interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central
government, so far as that work was possible,--thus proceeding in the
spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the
victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars.
This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long
prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references
to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of
American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck
down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in
his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a
truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance
between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman
whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while
Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by
quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834
concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its
chiefs, and the man who should now bring forward the conqueror of Gaul
as a vulgar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that
man who should insist that General Jackson destroyed American liberty
when he removed the deposits from the national bank. The facts and
fears of one generation often furnish material for nothing but jests
and jeers to that generation's successors; and we who behold a million
of men in arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all
calling themselves Americans, are astonished when we read or remember
that our immediate predecessors in the political world went to the
verge of madness on the Currency question. Perhaps the men of 1889 may
be equally astonished, when they shall turn to files of newspapers that
were published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events
that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thousands of
families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the
misjudging of the present, and the failure to comprehend the future.

Men of a very different stamp from the first of the Romans have been
allowed the benefits that come from a rehearing of their causes.
Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has
found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that
greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was
an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had
the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to
be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have
tried the soundest of heads, even had that head been united with the
purest of hearts. But the apologists of "the sea-green incorruptible,"
it must be admitted, have not been very successful, as the sence of
mankind revolts at indiscriminate murder, even when the murderer's
hands have no other stain than that which comes from blood,--for that
is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or
cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and
Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender
or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly
recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and
career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he
received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. Mr.
Paget has all but whitewashed Marlborough, and has shaken many men's
faith in the justice of Lord Macauley's judgement and in the accuracy
of his assertions. Richard III., by all who can look through the clouds
raised by Shakespeare over English history of the fifteenth century, is
admitted to have been a much better man and ruler than were the average
of British monarchs from the Conquest to the Revolution, thanks to the
labors of Horace Walpole and Caroline Halsted, who, however, have only
followed in the path struck out by Sir George Buck at a much earlier
period. The case of Mary Stuart still remains unsettled, and bids fair
to be the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case of history; but this is owing to
the circumstance that that unfortunate queen is so closely associated
with the origin of our modern parties that justice where her reputation
is concerned is scarcely to be looked for. Little has been said for
King John; and Mr. Woolryche's kind attempt to reconcile men to the
name of Jeffreys has proved a total failure. Strafford has about as
many admirers as enemies among those who know his history, but this is
due more to the manner of his death than to any love of his life: of so
much more importance is it that men should die well than live well, so
far as the judgement of posterity is concerned with their actions.

Strafford's master, who so scandalously abandoned him to the headsman,
owes the existence of the party that still upholds his conduct to the
dignified manner in which he faced death, a death at which the whole
world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has
found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now
generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an
ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that
have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political
pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that
tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions,
have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential
affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it
will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian
gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian _gens_. It must be confessed
that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything
else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper
character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his
marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet.
They would have been mighty interesting reading,--as full of lies,
probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on
that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained
nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found
defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the
cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear
rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals
were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet
and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists
is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man
who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.

Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished
not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which
have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates.
Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of
anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in
crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Albèri, Catharine was not the
harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that
she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital
defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre
of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French _coup
d'état_, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions
seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in
1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if
she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender
mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was
only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,--a sort
of argument the force of which we always have been unable to
appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed
that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted. The
incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils
three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the
vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an
insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth
century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the
gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the
excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they
can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and
other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but
the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those
loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose
reign they were perpetrated.

The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology
than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in
history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and
winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith
because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he
nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man
and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the
sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform
movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed. A
legitimate king, though the heir of a successful usurpation, and
holding the royal prerogative as high as any man who ever grasped the
sceptre, he was the tool of the mightiest of revolutionists, and poured
out more royal and noble blood than ever flowed at the command of all
the Jacobins and Democrats that have warred against thrones and
dynasties and aristocracies. He is abhorred of Catholics, and
Protestants do not love him; for he pulled down the old religious
fabric of his kingdom, and furnished to the Reformers a permanent
standing-place from which to move the world, while at the same time he
slaughtered Protestants as ruthlessly as ever they were disposed of by
any ruler of the Houses of Austria and Valois. Reeking with blood, and
apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet
popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that
popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the
unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on
account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly
known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general
estimate of his character than would a whole volume of professed
personal panegyric, or of elaborate defence of his policy and his
deeds. But this is not sufficient for those persons who would have
reasons for their historical belief, and who seek to have a solid
foundation for the faith they feel in the real greatness of the second
Tudor king of England. Men of ability have occasionally sought to
create an intelligible Henry VIII., and to cause us to respect one
whose doings have so potently affected human affairs through ten
generations, and the force of whose labors, whether those labors were
blindly or rationally wrought, is apparently as unspent as it was on
that day on which, having provided for the butchery of the noblest of
his servants, he fell into his final sleep. At the head of these
philosophic writers, and so far ahead of them as to leave them all out
of sight, is Mr. James Anthony Froude, whose "History of England from
the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" has been brought down to
the death of Mary I., in six volumes,--another proof of the grand scale
on which history is now written, in order that it may be read on the
small scale; for it is not given to many men to have the time for study
which even a moderate modern course of history requires in these active
days. Mr. Froude is a very different writer from Dr. Nares, but the
suggestions made to the heavy Doctor by Macaulay might be borne in mind
by the lively historian. He should remember that "the life of man is
now threescore years and ten," and not "demand from us so large a
portion of so short an existence" as must necessarily be required for
the perusal of a history which gives an octavo volume for every five
years of the annals of a small, though influential monarchy.

Mr. Froude did not commence his work in a state of blind admiration of
his royal hero,--the tone of his first volume being quite calm, and on
the whole as impartial as could reasonably have been expected from an
Englishman writing of the great men of a great period in his country's
history; but so natural is it for a man who has assumed the part of an
advocate to identify himself with the cause of his client, that our
author rapidly passes from the character of a mere advocate to that of
a partisan, and by the time that he has brought his work down to the
execution of Thomas Cromwell, Henry has risen to the rank of a saint,
with a more than royal inability to do any wrong. That "the king can do
no wrong" is an English constitutional maxim, which, however sound it
may be in its proper place, is not to be introduced into history,
unless we are desirous of seeing that become a mere party-record. The
practice of publishing books in an incomplete state is one that by no
means tends to render them impartial, when they relate to matters that
are in dispute. Mr. Froude's first and second volumes, which bring the
work down to the murder of Anne Boleyn, afforded the most desirable
material for the critics, many of whom most pointedly dissented from
his views, and some of whom severely attacked his positions, and not
always unsuccessfully. They were, naturally, not disposed to think that
an act bad in itself changed its character when it became the act of
Henry VIII. It was contrary to all human experience to suppose that
Henry was in all cases in the right, while his opponents and his
victims were as invariably in the wrong. If there ever had lived and
reigned a man who could not do wrong, it was preposterous to look for
him in one who had been a wife-killer, a persecutor, the slayer of the
nobility of his kingdom, the exterminator of the last remnants of an
old royal race, the patron of fagots and ropes and axes, and a
hard-hearted and selfish voluptuary, who seems never to have been open
to one kind or generous feeling. Most of those tyrants that have been
hung up on high, by way of warning to despots, have had their
"uncorrupted hours," in which they vindicated their claim to humanity
by the performance of some good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is
supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with
garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same
moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish
father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the
feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the
death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's critics
failed to accept his estimate of Henry, or that they arrayed anew the
long list of his shocking misdeeds, and dwelt with unction on his total
want of sympathy with ordinary humanity. As little surprising is it
that Mr. Froude's attachment to the kingly queen-killer should be
increased by the course of the critics. That is the usual course. The
biographer comes to love the man whom at first he had only endured. To
endurance, according to the old notion, succeeds pity, and then comes
the embrace. And that embrace is all the warmer because others have
denounced the party to whom it is extended. It is fortunate that no man
of talent has ever ventured to write the biography of Satan. Assuredly,
had any such person done so, there would have been one sincere,
enthusiastic, open, devout Devil-worshipper on earth, which would have
been a novel, but not altogether a moral, spectacle for the eyes of
men. A most clear, luminous and unsatisfactory account of the conduct
of Satan in Eden would have been furnished, and it would have been
logically made out that all the fault of the first recorded son was
with Eve, who had been the temptress, not the tempted, and who had
taken advantage of the Devil's unsophisticated nature to impose upon
his innocence and simplicity, and then had gone about among "the
neighbors" to scandalize his character at tea-tables and
quilting-parties.

Mr. Froude is too able a man to seek to pass crude eulogy of Henry
VIII. upon the world. He knows that the reason why this or that or the
other thing was done is what his readers will demand, and he does his
best to meet their requirements. Very plausible, and very well
sustained by numerous facts, as well as by philosophical theory, is the
position which he assumes in reference to Henry's conduct. Henry,
according to the Froudean theory, was troubled about the succession to
the throne. His great purpose was to prevent the renewal of civil war
in England, a war for the succession. When he divorced Catharine of
Aragon, when he married Anne Boleyn, when he libelled and murdered Anne
Boleyn, when he wedded Jane Seymour, when he became disgusted with and
divorced Anne of Cleves, when he married and when he beheaded Catharine
Howard, when he patronized, used, and rewarded Cromwell, and when he
sent Cromwell to the scaffold and refused to listen to his plaintive
plea for mercy, when he caused Plantagenet and Neville blood to flow
like water from the veins of old women as well as from those of young
men, when he hanged Catholics and burned Protestants, when he caused
Surrey to lose the finest head in England,--in short, no matter what he
did, he always had his eye steadily fixed across that boiling sea of
blood that he had created upon one grand point, namely, the
preservation of the internal peace of England, not only while he
himself should live, but after his death. His son, or whoso should be
his heir, must succeed to an undisputed inheritance, even if it should
be necessary to make away with all the nobility of the realm, and most
of the people, in order to secure the so-much-desired quiet.
Church-yards were to be filled in order that all England might be
reduced to the condition of a church-yard. That _Red Spectre_
which has so often frightened even sensible men since 1789, and caused
some remarkably humiliating displays of human weakness during our
generation and its immediate predecessor, was, it should seem, ever
present to the eyes of Henry VIII. He saw Anarchy perpetually
struggling to get free from those bonds in which Henry VIII. had
confined that monster, and he cut off nearly every man or woman in
whose name a plea for the crown could be set up as against a Tudor
prince or princess. Like his father, to use Mr. Froude's admirable
expression, "he breathed an atmosphere of suspended insurrection," and
he was fixed and firm in his purpose to deprive all rebelliously
disposed people of their leaders, or of those to whom they would
naturally look for lead and direction. The axe was kept continually
striking upon noble necks, and the cord was as continually stretched by
ignoble bodies, because the King was bent upon making insurrection a
failing business at the best. Men and women, patrician and plebeian,
might play at rebellion, if they liked it, but they should be made to
find that they were playing the losing game.

Now, this succession-question theory has the merit of meeting the very
difficulty that besets us when we study the history of Henry's reign,
and it is justified by many things that belong to English history for a
period of more than two centuries,--that is to say, from the deposition
of Richard II., in 1399, to the death of Elizabeth, in 1603. It is a
strangely suggestive satire on the alleged excellence of hereditary
monarchy as a mode of government that promotes the existence of order
beyond any other, that England should not have been free from trouble
for two hundred years, because her people could not agree upon the
question of the right to the crown, and so long as that question was
left unsettled, there could be no such thing as permanent peace for
the castle or the cottage or the city. Town and country, citizen,
baron, and peasant, were alike dependent upon the ambition of aspiring
princes and king-makers for the condition of their existence. The folly
of Richard II. enabled Henry of Bolingbroke to convert his ducal
coronet into a royal crown, and to bring about that object which his
father, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, seems to have ever had at
heart. Henry IV. was a usurper, in spite of his Parliamentary title,
according to all ideas of hereditary right; for, failing heirs of the
body to Richard II., the crown belonged to the House of Mortimer, in
virtue of the descent of its chief from the Duke of Clarence, third
son of Edward III, the Duke of Lancaster being fourth son of that
monarch. Henry IV. felt the force of the objection that existed to his
title, and he sought to evade it by pretending to found his claim to
the crown on descent from Edmund of Lancaster, whom he assumed to have
been the _elder_ brother of Edward I.; but no weight was attached
to this plea by his contemporaries, who saw in him a monarch created
by conquest and by Parliamentary action. The struggle that then began
endured until both Plantagenets and Tudors had become extinct, and
the English crown had passed to the House of Stuart, in the person of
James I., who was descended in the female line from the Duke of
Clarence, through Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Edward IV., and
wife of Henry VII. Intrigues, insurrections, executions, and finally
great civil wars, grew out of the usurpation of the throne by the line
of Lancaster. We find the War of the Roses spoken of by nearly all
writers on it as beginning in 1455, when the first battle of St. Albans
was fought, but in fact the contest of which that war was but the
extreme utterance began nearly sixty years earlier than the day of the
Battle of St. Albans, its commencement dating from the time that Henry
IV. became King. A variety of circumstances prevented it from assuming
its severest development until long after all the actors in its early
stages had gone to their graves. Henry IV. was a man of superior
ability, which enabled him, though not without struggling hard for it,
to triumph over all his enemies; and his early death prevented a
renewal of the wars that had been waged against him. His son, the
overrated Henry V., who was far inferior to his father as a statesman,
entered upon a war with France, and so distracted English attention
from English affairs; and had he lived to complete his successes, all
objection to his title would have disappeared. Indeed, England herself
would have disappeared as a nation, becoming a mere French province, a
dependency of the House of Plantagenet reigning at Paris. But the
victor of Agincourt, like all the sovereigns of his line, died young,
comparatively speaking, and left his dominions to a child who was not a
year old, the ill-fated Henry VI. Then would have broken out the
quarrel that came to a head at the beginning of the next generation,
but for two circumstances. The first was, that the King's uncles were
able men, and maintained their brother's policy, and so continued that
foreign distraction which prevented the occurrence of serious internal
troubles for some years. The second was, that the Clarence or Mortimer
party had no leader.

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