Chapter IV: Part 4

But it would be absurd to suppose that James the Sixth and First was merely the ridiculous creature that I have depicted here. Those who wish to prove that he was a coward have first to account for the known fact that, until his knees stiffened under the influence of his decayed teeth, he was a brave and first-class horseman. It may be true that he could never bear the sight of a drawn sword; neither could Lord Roberts bear the sight of a cat. Before he was dragged to England he did for Scotland what the heavy-handed Tudors did for South Britain. By his skill and diplomacy he welded even fierce little Scotland into an orderly country, and taught the Scots lords and the ministers of the General Assembly that the king was their master.

King Charles I

Doctors seldom take much interest in politics. It is their general experience that for all the tumult and the shoutings of politicians nobody ever seems one penny the better for the uproar, for vast sums are wasted which would be much better expended in a way that we really do know something about, such as the cure of disease and the public health generally. In some ways the most interesting thing about the “Martyred Monarch” is the expression of wistful melancholy which is shown on the famous portrait by Van Dyck. It is undoubtedly due to this portrait that so much sympathy has always been felt for him; and the tragedy of King Charles has always impressed thoughtful men as a tragedy from the Greek.

In his early youth he stammered so badly that until he was ten he could hardly speak at all. Stammering is supposed to be a nervous habit due to a psychasthenic phobia; and the worst case of stammering that I ever knew was said to have been acquired by a nervous child of three, owing to a negligent nurse having locked him up in a dark cupboard while she read novels. Stammerers often express themselves by their pen; and several eminent writers, both in the past and in the present day, have been stammerers. Not less acute than other men—indeed often far more acute than the average—yet as they are invariably shy they are incapable of showing it in conversation; and the brutal outburst of Carlyle concerning poor Charles Lamb reflects an opinion that is too often held by the impatient and intolerant.

King Charles had during his day the finest collection of art-treasures in Europe; and in that fact we see the essentially refined and artistic character of the man, for he not only had the treasures, but understood them. Stammering often tends to improve as the man grows older. Demosthenes is said to have cured himself by shouting at the sea waves, while King Charles succeeded to a large extent by speaking with extraordinary slowness and dignity, though to some extent the habit remained with him to the end. Strangely enough the sad and pathetic expression on Van Dyck’s portrait is not unlike the sad and pathetic expression on the famous portrait statue of Demosthenes by Polyeuctes; although of course Demosthenes was of a much more aggressive character and more ready to make himself felt in public than Charles Stuart.

But in Van Dyck’s portrait we see probably the unconscious infantile fear in the baby Charles that ultimately led him to stammer; and possibly in the utterly wrong-headed obstinacy of the king in holding on to an impossible position, we see the determination that resulted in his curing himself sufficiently to attain the crown.

An incident occurred during his trial that may have led to a false impression. “They will not suffer me to speak,” he cried brokenly as they led him away. Is it possible that during that dreadful moment the old bad habit of his childish days returned, so that King Charles actually _could_ not speak for the time?

He is said to have been one of the few kings of really noble domestic character, a faithful husband and affectionate father. Yet though he could be faithful to his wife he could not help telling lies to his friends.

“Vanquished in life his death
By beauty made amends;
The passing of his breath
Won its defeated ends.”

Charles was temperate, chaste and serious; he treated those about him with punctilious courtesy and expected the same in return.

But it may be that in the twistings and turnings of his political career we see the qualities that are not inconsistent with the artistic temperament.

As for the apparent cause of Charles’s stammering, that is quite impossible even to guess. It is possible that he, a naturally sensitive and refined little boy, may have been unconsciously terrified by his father’s unpleasant personal habits. At any rate, let us keep a soft spot in our hearts for the ill-fated king.

Whence came the somewhat nervous strain that runs, like a brass thread, through the whole dynasty of the Stuarts, I hesitate to speculate: perhaps from Darnley, father of James I. They always make me think of a set of naughty children wedged between the great gloomy Tudors and the unpleasant Hanoverians. There was James I, who is generally held by the English to have been an egregious person; next, Charles I, who, probably, would have done better as a poet; then Charles II, who was by far the cleverest of them, but was too lazy; and lastly the gloomy and exceedingly immoral—if all tales are true—James II, who was a man too much under the influence of religion. It is said that he used to get absolution after every time that he visited his mistress. Then there was that poor, lonely, stupid Anne, who could not, for some reason, rear a single one of her numerous children.

King Charles II

As the best thing that we hear of the life of King Charles II is the manner of his leaving it, I confine myself to a description of his death. You will get a moderately good account of it in Bishop Burnet’s history, of which Swift was so scornful; and a recognisable account of it in Lord Macaulay, written with all the fixed ideas of the early nineteenth century colouring the ink; but the real truth appeared in an article in the _British Medical Journal_ for 1910, which again was drawn largely from Dr. Raymond Crawfurd’s _Last Days of Charles II_. As Dr. Crawfurd gives the official report of Sir Charles Scarburgh, one of the consultants in attendance at the time, probably we may take it that we have the exact details so far as the medical science of 1685 could give them.

Towards the end of 1684 the king did not feel quite well: he was irritable and depressed, and thought it wise to remain indoors during the mornings, instead of taking his usual active walks. He attributed his illness to gout. It would be interesting to speculate on what the disease actually was that so often was called “gout” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are many conditions which cause symptoms such as might be mistaken for gout; let us leave it at that, for even to-day a doctor, forced to give to a vague complaint a name, sometimes takes refuge in the euphemism “rheumatic gout.” During these few days indoors he amused himself by playing with mercury in his laboratory, for, as is well known, he was of scientific bent. At last came the fateful morning, Monday, February 2nd, 1685. At eight o’clock the king, while being shaved, fell back with a cry into the arms of an attendant, Lord Aylesbury. According to Dr. Scarburgh, “Charles, having just left his bed, was walking about quietly in his bedchamber when he felt some unusual disturbance in his brain, which was followed by loss of speech and violent convulsions.” There happened to be present at the time two of the king’s physicians who, so as promptly to forestall so serious a danger to “this best of kings,” as Scarburgh has it, opened a vein in his right arm and drew 16 ounces of blood. As a matter of fact, this assault, though seemingly homicidal, was probably as good a thing as could have been done for him, though few doctors would have the moral courage to do it to-day. His head was closely shaved; his neck and shoulders were blistered and scarified; emetics, purgatives and clysters were administered, and every reputable doctor, regardless of his religion, was summoned to the defence. Whitehall must have presented a lively spectacle that winter morning with all the periwigs and silver buckles and gold-headed canes and wise faces. In fact, they did what they could: if they had known that the cause of the convulsions was probably that the king’s kidneys had “gone on strike,” they could have done little more than endeavour to get rid of the poisons that must have been circulating in his body by some other effluent than by the urine. After about two hours their efforts were crowned with success. The king, whose face had been hideously black,—i.e., cyanosed—and whose eyes had been rolling this way and that, woke up, and proceeded to give an account of himself. The poisons had for a time been got out of his body; but only for a time. He said that, not feeling very well when he awakened, he had gone to his private closet to get some “king’s drops,” which Dr. Crawfurd explains to have been “a volatile extract of bone made in the king’s laboratory according to the formula of the late Dr. Goddard, and in high repute on the Continent.”

Charles was then out of immediate danger, and during the Tuesday he remained fairly well except for some soreness about the neck and mouth, which was probably due to the efforts that had had to be made to get him to swallow his medicines. Just so to-day, a patient occasionally wakes up from an anæsthetic with a stiff jaw after the efforts which have had to be made to pull his tongue forward if his breathing has given trouble while he was unconscious. Charles complained of great pain in his interior, which was probably less a symptom of his illness than of the violent purgatives that had been forced down his throat; but to the horrified Bishop Burnet it was “agonies.”

The doctors, pestered by the ministers of the Crown to give the king’s illness a name, were greatly perturbed, and all fourteen[12] of them entered into many grave consultations one with another. On the afternoon of Wednesday, February 4th, the convulsions returned, and as intermittent fever was then especially prevalent in and about London they said that probably His Majesty was suffering from that complaint, though to be sure the violent convulsions, cyanosed skin, loss of speech, and turning of the eyeballs did not look quite like intermittent fever. But the council was satisfied, which, to the doctors wrestling with a mysterious and complex disease, was probably all that they could expect, for it enabled them to say that they now knew what to do, and that, apparently, the king was in no great immediate danger. As the _British Medical Journal_ rather unkindly points out: “On June 21st, 1902, the late King Edward’s Private Secretary wrote that there was not a word of truth in the rumours that had been floating about concerning His Majesty’s health, though on June 24th the coronation was postponed and he had to be operated on for appendicitis”; though, considering what a sudden thing acute appendicitis is, there is little wonder that three days before anyone might not have known of his coming ill health.

On the Thursday occurred those dramatic events of which conventional historians have made so much. When he was first taken ill on the Monday his poor wife had hurried to his side, and had taken the place of at least one of his mistresses in nursing him. Catherine of Braganza may not have had sufficient physical charm to keep his wayward fancy, and may not have been able to bear him an heir,[13] but at least she was faithful to him unto his death. In her presence the other women retired, and she nursed her husband until the horrors of the sick room overcame her; she felt faint and withdrew; as Macaulay says, “was carried senseless to her chamber.” Little wonder; the sick room must indeed have been horrible to every sense, with all the purgatives and clysters and cauterization of bare skin, and a husband writhing in convulsions and rolling his eyes, apparently in the utmost agony, though I doubt if he felt anything at all in his fits. Early in her married life she had fainted when Charles had introduced her to his mistress _en titre_. There had been many occasions for fainting since then, and she had been accused of trying to poison Charles, who had humiliated her. Later on she sent word to him that she asked his pardon for being too ill to come to his aid; and Charles said, “She ask my pardon, poor woman! I ask hers, with all my heart.” Yet the time was to come when she was accused of inducing him to turn Roman Catholic. Macaulay seems rather to blame the Duchess of Portsmouth for seeing that he was “reconciled” to the Church, as she would doubtless put it, but there is another suggestion that occurs to myself. With all his laziness and clever frivolity, Charles was, after all, very much like other men; he had had a mother, and Queen Henrietta Maria, though a daughter of Henri Quatre, was an ardent Roman Catholic; during the first few years of her married life with King Charles I she had undergone a great deal of hardship for her religion. She must have frequently, like other mothers, talked over religious matters with her children; and when Charles II came to die, when his courage and self-esteem were weakened by the crowning humiliation of death, it is quite possible that in that awful moment he may have sincerely turned to Mother Church, that Church which had consoled his mother, as a refuge. And hence doubtless arose that dramatic interlude in the act of dying that Macaulay paints so vividly. The Duchess of Portsmouth may have wept and poured out her heart to the French Ambassador as he says; no doubt the Benedictine monk, John Huddlestone, was summoned just as he says; but after all, it is the penitent himself who had to do penance, and quite possibly Charles, in trying to swallow the holy bread, was really unconsciously remembering the teachings of his Roman Catholic mother. We have seen how Elizabeth, when dying, recalled to her memory events of her youth; why should we not think just the same of Charles II? He was not mad as Protestants said; he was just dying. It is quite a common incident with the dying, and is supposed to account for the known phenomenon that rationalists, when they feel their brain is beginning to betray them, have embraced Christianity. Then he commended the Duchess to the care of his brother, the Duke of York, afterwards James II, “and,” he said, “let not poor Nelly starve.” Again he was thinking of the past, this time the recent past, for “pretty witty Nell” (as Pepys calls her), “the most indiscreet and the wildest creature that ever was in a court” (as Burnet calls her), had been his mistress for many years—since about 1670—and was the most popular of all, “a true child of the London streets.” She, it is said, was the only woman who was really faithful to him at heart except his wife. At half-past ten on the Friday, Charles again became speechless; before twelve he was dead, probably of a uræmic coma due to chronic Bright’s disease.

Then came the inevitable accusations of poisoning which attended every sudden death in that suspicious age. We can, I believe, even explain some of the symptoms that were considered so suspicious. It was quite natural that Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, should be accused of poisoning him, for it was well known at that time that Frenchwomen and Roman Catholics invariably worked by poison, and unhappily for Louise she was both. But what kind of poison could cause blue spots to form upon a man’s chest? And what kind of poison could make his tongue swell up? I must try to explain in popular language what chronic Bright’s disease really is. It is not merely a disease of the kidneys. The kidneys indeed become sclerosed, or hardened, and in time become shrivelled; but with this the arteries and heart also become diseased; the heart becomes enlarged, and the blood-vessels thickened and hardened; rather than a disease of the kidneys alone it is almost a thickening of the arteries all over the body, including those in the kidneys. And with this thickening goes a loss of elasticity, so that blood-vessels are apt to rupture at the slightest provocation. So that in the struggles of his uræmic convulsions it is quite possible that tiny capillaries of the king’s chest may have ruptured and caused blue spots on the neighbouring skin. If he had not died it is quite probable that the whites of his eyes might have become bloodshot, from the rupture of some tiny arteriole. It often happens to-day in Bright’s disease.

And the tongue? Quite frequently the tongue and larynx suddenly swell up in chronic Bright’s disease, and the patient suffocates before he can obtain relief. King Charles was indeed poisoned, though not by human agency. He was poisoned by the toxins which should have been excreted by his own kidneys, but could not be got rid of by any human aid; that is to say, he probably died of uræmia from chronic Bright’s disease.

A post-mortem examination was held, so we can get even further evidence. One could not expect a doctor in the seventeenth century to observe that his kidneys were obviously diseased, or that part of his brain was œdematous or softened, as often happens in Bright’s disease, and would no doubt cause the loss of speech. But they did observe that his heart was enlarged, a most significant point.

I remember one of the very first private patients that I ever had, nearly thirty years ago. A middle-aged Englishman had come to Sydney from China for his health, apparently feeling fairly well, though debilitated by the tropical climate. Suddenly, as he was shaving, he was taken ill with a violent fit of convulsions, and, in spite of all that we could do for him, died in the course of two or three days with symptoms that exactly resembled those so graphically portrayed by Lord Macaulay and Dr. Crawfurd.

There is much of extraordinary interest to be found in Dr. Crawfurd’s book which gives the fantastic truth about medicine in 1685,[14] I can only advise you to read the book. In spite of the queer medicines that they used to prescribe I fancy that doctors at that time had more common sense than we moderns seem to think, and I very much doubt if anything could have saved King Charles’s life, except perhaps for a short time. He had come to his end. Our treatment would have been less drastic, but little more successful.

The cause of chronic Bright’s disease is not definitely known. It has been attributed to innumerable things; indeed, to everything which any given physician does not like himself; and comparatively recently it has even been attributed to improper feeding in infancy, so far back in life are its roots supposed to go. Indeed, it is generally thought to be hereditary; but probably it is still a mystery, though overeating and overdrinking may have something to do with it, not to mention, of course, syphilis, but so many men who have not had syphilis die of chronic Bright’s disease that it would not be fair to state it as the cause.

But why is it that Henri Quatre, whose morals were little if at all better than those of Charles, has become a national hero, while Charles is always held up as a byword for infamy? I do not know; but the usual explanation is that the English are at heart Puritans, and M. Chevrillon, in his recent essays on English literature, has accepted that as the reason for the popularity of Kipling and Galsworthy. But I sometimes wonder whether, had England been more successful under Charles II, so much would have been heard of his immorality. After all, Lord Nelson was not a Joseph, but he saved England from Napoleon; whereas Charles II saw the Dutch fleet in the Thames, and ran about chasing butterflies while the guns thundered.

All medical students, and most doctors, pass through a period when they are convinced that they have chronic Bright’s disease, and it is not till after visiting their physicians in an agony of mind that they are relieved of their mental distress. Let not a lay reader be silly enough to copy these apprehensive doctors. No man can be his own physician.

But perhaps the most interesting things about Charles II are the sterility of his wife, Catherine of Braganza, and his affection for “poor Nelly,” which she undoubtedly returned. Catherine appears to have been a convent-bred maiden with beautiful eyes. She was by no means the king’s first or last love; and several months after the marriage she fell ill of some sickness that brought her to death’s door, so that they had to administer extreme unction. It was probably owing to this illness that she never had a child, and was afterwards often ill. Such a trouble as pelvic peritonitis, with inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, often causes sterility. It is Nature’s stupid way of saving the patient’s life that she isolates the inflammation and seals the tubes, so that the woman indeed lives, but miserable, sterile, neurasthenic, and in constant pain. What was the actual cause of the illness in Catherine’s case it is impossible to say. One ventures to hazard a guess that the real cause of Catherine’s sterility was simply adhesions and blocked Fallopian tubes; it is certain that it had nothing to do with King Charles’s potency, because he had many natural children by other women. It is in that severe illness several months after she was married that the explanation of her sterility probably lies. We see innumerable cases of this sort to-day.

About Nell Gwynn. She was herself the daughter of a prostitute who, in a fit of drink, one night fell into a ditch and was drowned. Her charm over the king probably lay in her wit and recklessness; she dared to say to him things that no one else on earth ventured. She was faithful to him after he had won her—if indeed she took much winning. Other women, such as La Belle Stuart, and Louise de Querouaille, pretended to resist him for a time, but Nell seems to have been really fond of him and did not resist at all. Remember she was, before she became an actress, an orange-girl—that is to say, a prostitute. Everything we hear of her tells of her uniform kindness and generosity; she was of course extremely loose in her conduct and morals, but she seems to have cared little for money. She died about two years after the king, apparently of a stroke that had brought on one-sided paralysis or hemiplegia; and considering the assured facts of her youth, and the early age at which she died, that stroke was probably caused by syphilis, which had lain latent in her ever since the time when she sold herself with her oranges in the pit of Drury Lane.

But no person should attempt to describe the life either of Charles II or Nell Gwynn who has the slightest tendency to moralise; for neither the wittiest of the Stuarts nor the clever little actress can be explained on conventional codes of morality. It is the attempt to consider Charles II as if he had been a child of Queen Victoria, and to moralise over him, that makes most books about him so repulsive.

But Nell did not try to enter politics; she resisted the temptation to be queen, even if the opportunity had ever offered. She knew that her only function in life was to charm; and with the coldly realistic outlook on life that is common to all prostitutes, she knew that in the position of a queen she must come up against the harsh facts of reality, and that, like Anne Boleyn, she would probably lose her head in every sense of the word. Mere power to charm is not for a queen. Nell’s memory, owing to her wisdom and self-restraint, has been tenderly treated by the English people, in spite of that prudery which has scoffed at the real cleverness of her royal lover. Nell Gwynn, to use her own coarse words, was content to remain “the Protestant whore,” the cleverness of her tongue enabled her to keep her place at Court against all rivals, and her charm even impresses us to-day, who have never seen her dance nor heard her cockney witticisms. “Let not poor Nelly” fade from our memories.

Henri Quatre

The great thing about Henri Quatre, from the point of view of a medical essayist, is that no person of an anti-syphilitic fury will expect him to be classed as an awful warning of the devastations of that disease. Poor Henri died of good honest assassination, the product of an even worse disease than syphilis—sectarian intolerance. A disease which could cause the awful wars of Henri’s own life, and a few years later the most dreadful of all wars—the Thirty Years’—need not fear to be classed alongside even the most disreputable and destructive of human disorders. And the fact that nobody in these terrible wars ever had the least idea why people were killing each other only makes the marvel of sectarian intolerance even more amazing than it is. Of course, there is no such thing as _religious_ intolerance. Religion should make war impossible, and should inculcate tolerance for other people’s opinions. Did the good-natured and kindly gods of old Greece ever breed a religious war? Did anybody ever go swashbuckling in helmet and armour for Zeus or Aphrodite? Unless perhaps Aphrodite to him meant some individual woman who had been raped from her home, such as Helen of Troy; and Helen probably meant some vague abstraction of a Greek woman as opposed to a barbarian, if she did not symbolise Greek trade through the Hellespont, obstructed by Trojan robber bands. The Marxian materialist view of history grows rather attractive when it is applied to people who have been dead three thousand years.

Quite apart from the murderous sectarian squabbles, which have been dignified by the name of religious wars, the life of Henri Quatre, very properly classed as one of the heroes of France, is extraordinarily interesting to a doctor. But in many ways the most interesting thing about him was his relations with women. Henri may have had some conscience about religion—though I doubt it—but, like our own Charles II, he had absolutely no conscience about women. To him, whether he was married or not, any pretty girl was fair game; and those who care to read pornography can find plenty of it in the record of his life. The seventeenth century was a period of bitter sectarian differences, and it was a time when the divine right of kings to possess pretty girls was elevated almost to an article of faith. Thus we had the marvellous spectacles of King Henri IV and King Charles II, of whom the one became a national hero, the other a byword for flippancy and falsehood. I am not going to be led into any temptation to find the cause of the one phenomenon in the other—to say that if it had not been a period of such bitter sectarianism the virtue of girls might have been more sacred to kings, because there have been good kings and bad kings at all times; girls have been virtuous or wanton, whatever their religion; and the seventeenth century was not the only century in history. The sixteenth and eighteenth could show instances of moral depravity quite as bad as that of either Henri Quatre or Charles Stuart. Let us see what a doctor may be able to say about Henri Quatre.

When he was about nineteen he married Marguerite de Valois, the third of that name, who has achieved fame under the popular name of Reine Margot. She was sister to King Henri III of France; our Henri was at that time only king of Navarre; his little kingdom lay in the south of France, near the borders of Spain. His father had been Anthony of Bourbon; his mother Joan of Albret. Joan had agreed to the marriage with a very heavy heart: she feared the bright eyes of the Catholic enchantress who was to bewitch her own beloved son. She herself was a Huguenot, who looked upon Marguerite as sent directly from the devil. If Marguerite had really been sent by Satan to the inferno of Parisian wickedness she needed no great ensnaring; for, when she married the good Henri of Navarre, simple young country bumpkin that he was, she is said to have already had an affair with the Duke of Guise, and her reputation for virtue would not have passed any great test. She was pretty, and what was more potent, she had a peculiar charm of manner that enabled her to capture all but the most resistant of men. Many of us remember how Marguerite, in the “Huguenots” of Meyerbeer, dances along the stage singing to her lute and plangent orchestral pizzicati “The fair land of Touraine.” Although this, according to Wagner, is very inartistic, still, it is very charming, and has no doubt left Marguerite for us moderns with a character that is more beautiful than it really was. She could no more resist enchanting a man than Henri could resist trying to possess a good-looking girl: the bonds of matrimony sat very lightly upon both. There was no love in the marriage, which was, almost more cynically than most royal marriages, simply an affair of State. Catherine de Medici, Marguerite’s mother, wished to convert Henri to the Catholic faith, and at the same time to make him an enemy of Spain, which, under Don John of Austria, had just won the earth-shaking victory of Lepanto.

But Marguerite could do something else besides make love: she could write. At a time when every one else was striving to be distinguished in style Marguerite wrote as simply and clearly as if she were speaking; and her _Memories_ are therefore still delightful to read. Just after her marriage the massacre of St. Bartholomew broke out. Let the royal lady tell how it affected herself. “An hour later, while I was fast asleep, someone came beating at my door with hands and feet, and shouting Navarre, Navarre! My nurse, thinking it was my husband, ran to open the door. It was a gentleman, wounded by a sword-thrust in the elbow, and his arm cut by a halberd, who rushed into my room pursued by four archers. Seeking safety he threw himself on my bed. Feeling this man clutching me I threw myself into the open space between the bed and the wall, where, he still grasping me, we both rolled over, both screaming and both equally frightened. Fortunately the Captain of my Guards, M. de Nancay, came by, and seeing me in such a plight could not help laughing, but drove the archers out of the room, and gave me the life of the poor gentleman, who was still clinging to me, and whom I caused to be tended in my dressing-room till he was quite cured. While I changed my nightdress,”—Marguerite was lucky to be wearing one in 1572—“for he had covered me with his blood, M. de Nancay told me what had happened, and assured me that my husband was in the king’s room and was quite safe. Making me throw on a dressing-gown, he led me to the room of my sister, Madame de Lorraine, which I reached more dead than alive; just as I was going into the anteroom a gentleman, trying to escape from the archers who were pursuing him, fell dead three paces from me. I too fell half-fainting into the arms of M. de Nancay, and felt as if the same blow had pierced us both.”

Dumas describes this incident in _Marguerite de Valois_; but his description is no more vivid than Marguerite’s. The temptation to make the poor fugitive the hero of his book was too great, and he turned the ill-fated De la Mole into Marguerite’s unwilling bedfellow on that night of weeping. I dare say that Marguerite was not sorry to be able to save the poor man’s life, even though Dumas makes her behave far from generously to his hero later. If I remember rightly she has him tortured by the “boot.”

Queen Joan, her mother-in-law, describes her as being very pretty, but one could not see her face for the paint; she was rather too stout, and was tightly laced. Afterwards, when she had abandoned all sense of decency, she became enormously fat, and could hardly get through an ordinary door. Her intelligence and great fondness for reading probably did not make Henri love her any better, because he could never finish a serious book. She said about her brother Henri III that if all the treachery in the world should perish Henri III had enough to restock it; so it is clear that brother and sister did not really love one another; and probably Marguerite could not resist the temptation to make a scathing epigram.

But Joan need not have been so perturbed over her son falling into the hands of the satanic Marguerite, for, if all tales were true, she was no great saint herself. Once, when Henri III was in a particularly bad temper, he went to Marguerite in church and called her all manner of abominable names, so that she turned and ran weeping out of the church. Later he went up to Henri Quatre and half-apologised for his rudeness, explaining it because of some unfortunate incidents that had been rumoured about Queen Joan’s own virtue. Henri laughed, and afterwards said, “What a nice fellow he must be! He thinks by saying that I am a bastard to make up for calling my wife a prostitute!” That was really much the sort of thing that our own beloved Charles II might have said; and it shows Henri Quatre as a maker of epigrams with just sufficient truth in them to hurt. And all done with a kindly smile, too.

When the civil war broke out Henri of Navarre took the lead with furious energy on the Protestant side; and it was then that he won his reputation for soldiering and for romance. The white plume of Navarre has been an oriflamme for many a novelist ever since. And it was more than romance, though treated romantically by Macaulay in his _Battle of Ivry_. Henry had bound upon his head a great plume of white peacock feathers just before the battle. “Should the standards fall,” he cried, “rally round the white plume of Navarre. I promise you that it shall be found in the thickest of the fighting.” He made good his boast, for he charged the Catholics two horses’ lengths ahead of his followers, and fought furiously until his sword was beaten out of shape and his right arm swelled with over-exertion—I suppose the lymphatics of the arm became somehow obstructed, but I confess I do not quite understand the pathological condition; still, the incident made a great impression upon his soldiers and gave Henri of Navarre a name for immense courage and enterprise. As a result of many hours’ fierce fighting the Protestants swept the field, partly because the Swiss mercenaries, finding that the League had not paid their wages, surrendered incontinently. “Pas d’argent—pas de Suisse,” was their excellent motto, which the League should have remembered. If Henri had swept on to Paris the opinion is that he might have entered it with very little trouble. But he had no money, he had fired away all his ammunition, and the roads were made impassable by recent rains; moreover, even if Paris had opened her gates to him the Pope would never have ceased his hostility to a Protestant king of France; and once more the old spectre of civil war, interminable, bloodthirsty, and dreadful, would have arisen. And, after all, the majority of Frenchmen were Catholic; and the mighty power of Spain waited just over the Pyrenees to help the Pope if indeterminate civil war should occur. Paris lay, weakly defended, ready for assault; but it would have been a terrible crime for Henri to give the word, and to subject his capital to a worse than St. Bartholomew. So he agreed to “receive instruction,” saying before he did so that his religion was that of all brave men. Paris, strictly invested, suffered the worst horrors of famine. Soldiers killed and ate stray children, and a woman even salted down and ate her own babies who had died of starvation. It is said that the poor creature went “melancholy” from this Thyestian feast, and who can wonder? The great Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, was arriving from the Netherlands with a relieving army of Spaniards; he outmanœuvred Henri, and opened navigation to the beleaguered city. Henri could neither pay his men nor would he permit them to pay themselves by the sack of the city, so naturally they went home. Henri and a few faithful friends and horse soldiers retired to watch and hope. Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of his great, though somewhat thrifty, ally, Elizabeth of England, that “if God shall, by His merciful grace, grant you victory, I swear to you that it will be more than your carelessness deserves.” Kipling, in an unforgettable phrase, has told us all about the “female of the species”; and in many ways, Elizabeth was the female of the species to which Henri Quatre belonged. The daughter of Henry VIII would have had no mercy if her own ends had been at stake. And yet, I don’t know. Tilly a few years afterwards showed at Magdeburg the horrors that could be perpetrated by religious enthusiasts; and one hates to think that Elizabeth’s famous patriotism could ever have allowed her to sacrifice London for a point of belief. Henri Quatre had not only allowed friends in Paris to be fed while he was supposed to be investing it savagely, but he had allowed it to slip through his fingers when he might have captured it, all through a tender-heartedness that would spare its citizens the horrors of a Magdeburgian sack. It is no wonder that with all his faults he is one of the heroes of France. Then Parma, finding that the Parisians hated Spanish pride more than they hated French Protestants, went away with his invincible army; and as soon as his back was turned Henri resumed the siege. Parma had proved, if nothing more, that he was a better strategist than Henri Quatre; but Paris returned to the old misery of starvation and disease, a misery that it has so often braved nobly.

And now began Henri’s more serious troubles with women. For a long time he had an affair with one Madame de Grasmont, whom he called Corisande. To her he wrote the most passionate of letters. Anybody would think to read them that he really loved her; but even as he besieged Paris he had fallen in love with the abbesses of Poissy and Montmartre, whose profession should have taught them wisdom if not virtue. Now came a more serious affair. In 1590 he met a Gabrielle d’Estrees, with whom he fell violently in love while he was “carrying on” with the other three ladies. She already had a beautiful lover; but that did not matter to Henri Quatre. Probably it only caused him to admire her the more. He slipped through detachments of the enemy dressed as a woodcutter with a bundle of straw on his head to visit her: a nice romantic and undignified action for a king; but we shall see later, as he grew older, how he could stoop even lower. For the present the problem was how to gain possession of Gabrielle, get rid of Corisande, and set up a nominal possessor who should not be a rival in Gabrielle’s heart. He got her father to marry Gabrielle to a M. de Liancourt, an aged widower with eleven children, while Henri IV enjoyed the _droits de seigneur_. Corisande, growing old, dropped out of the picture.

Then came a fierce struggle for Rouen, with Parma hovering ready to give battle. Again he showed his superiority to Henri Quatre as a strategist by transporting his army secretly across the Seine and escaping Henri’s threatened attack. Henri had a much larger army than Parma’s, and it was only Parma’s extraordinary skill that saved him from destruction. But now came the end of the long war; for Parma died and Henri turned Catholic. “Paris is well worth a Mass!” as he did not say. We have always been taught to consider this as an act of shameless cynicism; but there was a great deal to be said in Henri’s favour: certainly from the point of view of the twentieth century his action was the only thing that could have brought peace to his country. Though Parma was dead, Spain was still powerful and vengeful; the Catholic priests called Henri heretic, relapsed miscreant, devil and bastard, whom the soldiers knew to be a kind and generous friend, always smiling and ready to help. Gabrielle—“charmante Gabrielle,” who has given her name to a song that Henri wrote in her honour—urged him to turn Catholic, that the Pope might perhaps divorce Marguerite and let him marry Gabrielle. So Henri yielded, threw his scruples to the winds, and embraced the Old Religion; though his embrace was probably not so ardent as those which he gave to the abbesses, who more corporeally represented the faith to which he yielded.

An amusing sidelight on his character is thrown by his message to Queen Elizabeth by the mouth of her supposed lover Essex, whom she had been rating soundly because he had lost too many Englishmen in Henri’s wars. The irate Virgin was so flattered by Henri’s praise of her beauty and charm that it needed all her caution and frugality to keep England from plunging single-handed into yet another great war with Spain on his behalf. Happily for us she had sense enough to keep out of it; and before her help became necessary Henri had gone to Mass. When Henri fell so shamelessly in love with Gabrielle he was thirty-five years of age, and perhaps the ordinary neurasthenia of middle age began to trouble him—that cause of so much marital unhappiness and so many divorces. But, if any one woman could be said to have captured his heart, it was undoubtedly Gabrielle. I once read an account of her written by a lady, possibly unmarried. Anyhow, none would have guessed from this extremely proper description that she was Henri’s official mistress; the good lady seems never to have heard of a man being anything but a woman’s husband. Gabrielle was rather ample of figure—Henri seems to have liked his women fat—and had deep blue eyes and golden hair. Her face was kind and smiling, her manner gentle; before she fell in love with Henri her morals had been, to say the least, unconventional; after she admitted the king to her friendship she continued her relations with the lover who had innocently introduced her to this more enterprising king. She was extravagant, and the king loaded her with jewels at a time when he said he was penniless; created her Marchioness of Monceaux and Duchess of Beaufort. He was as faithful to her as it was possible for him to be to any woman, which is not saying very much. At any rate his _amours_ were henceforth conducted with a certain amount of decency and discretion. When she died the only book found in her possession was her “book of hours.” Except for her easy morals it would be impossible to find a greater contrast than that between her and Marguerite, who could wrap herself in learned books, play the lute, and write like a novelist. It would seem impossible for even “Aunt Tabitha” of a lady’s newspaper to give to Marguerite de Valois any hints on the art of managing a husband; but it is clear that she did not go the right way about it with Henri of Navarre; and Gabrielle d’Estrees was evidently much more to his taste, for he remained approximately, though not bigotedly, faithful to her till she died. In justice to Marguerite it is only fair to say that she never liked him; she was forced by mother and brother into marrying him; and probably even a sixteenth-century princess had her preferences. The ultimate result was that Gabrielle became a sort of idol among the people, who overlooked her unusual position for the sake of her wide-set blue eyes and kind smile; and a few years after she died she was already a legend. To this day she and Henri Quatre are greeted with a kindly smile among the French when one mentions them, and “charmante Gabrielle” is still a well-known song.

As the years rolled by she bore him several children, and more and more took the position of his wife. He became still more infatuated with her; and she, for her part, abandoned the life of dissipation which is said to have distinguished her youth. Henri wanted to marry her; she must have had great powers of fascination to make him so faithful after so many years. The idea was to procure a divorce from Marguerite and elevate his mistress to the throne. But just before the proposed marriage Gabrielle went to Paris and stayed at the house of an Italian named Zamet. On April 7th, 1599, she became very ill, and was artificially delivered of a dead child on the 9th. She fell into violent convulsions; on the 10th she became unconscious, and that evening she died. Of course Sully, who did not like her—for even Gabrielle had her enemies—hinted that she was poisoned—such was the reputation of the Italians in Paris at that time—and Sully’s ill-natured hint has evidently influenced historians to this day, for the good lady whom I quoted above repeats it as at least probable. But is it not much more probable that she died of puerperal eclampsia? She was middle-aged; she had had several children; she was far from slight in figure. At the Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney we find that most of these women who die nowadays from eclampsia are very much like Gabrielle in age, figure, and the number of their children. Of course it is impossible to say definitely; but I should be very much surprised to find that Gabrielle’s kidneys were absolutely healthy during that last year of her life. And it is quite possible that in that last confinement Gabrielle in this way paid the penalty for her dissipation in early youth. It is at least more likely that she should die from a perfectly well-known and fatal disease such as eclampsia than that anybody should try to poison a woman so generally popular, though she had enemies who were both jealous of her and disliked the idea of a royal mistress becoming Queen of France. Kidney trouble is often caused by drink, and people at the Court of France—indeed, all over Europe—generally used to drink too much in those days. After all, it is only a speculation that could easily explain the sudden death of an apparently perfectly healthy woman just as the moment was approaching when she would achieve her ambition.

Henri was broken-hearted; he swore that never more could he see happiness again. Yet three months later he was paying court to a very different sort of woman from Gabrielle—to Henriette d’Entragues, a slim girl of eighteen with a bitter tongue. He was then about fifty years of age, and had led a very anxious and troubled life. He had been a hard rider, a famous cavalryman. At the end of a few weeks of “courtship” he induced Henriette to accept a document in which he promised to marry her if she could bear him a living son in the course of a year. Henriette agreed to try, and joyfully took her position as the mistress and promised wife of the King. But alas for Henriette! Six months later there came a terrible thunderstorm that caused her to miscarry, and released Henri of his bargain. But his ministers had already engaged him to Marie de’ Medici; and Henri probably felt that Jove’s thunderbolt had come to his assistance. By that time Marguerite had been duly divorced by an obliging Pope, who would no doubt do a great deal for the brand plucked from the burning of Protestantism. In middle age Marguerite became enormously fat, and there are many stories told about her orgies with footmen and other tall fellows. It is said that, if they died in her service, she used to carry their hearts about her in a bag, and that she used to wear a wig made from their locks of yellow hair. Indeed, imagination has exhausted itself in devising infamies for the last years of Marguerite de Valois. It is difficult to recognise this corpulent and beraddled woman in the gay young princess who danced to lute and pizzicati strings in the “Huguenots.” Reine Margot indeed had a sorrowful ending, judging by the ordinary canons of human happiness. But perhaps the stories are not true. She is always considered an amazing example of the Valois faculty for combining artistic sensibility with the grossest lust. Strange things are said to have happened in history; and one must always remember her very unhappy marriage.

Soon after fifty old age, according to Sir Humphrey Rolleston, usually touches the average man lightly on the shoulder, and his friends begin indelicately to “chaff” him, saying, “Oh, you’re not as good a man as you were ten years ago”; it is then that the average man, according to some philosophers, begins to feel happy for the first time in his life. Proverbs have been coined about this well-known fact, on the lines of the Greek “call no man happy till he is dead.” According to another school of philosophy happiness only comes with the loss of the teeth. But sometimes the aging man boasts of his prowess as if to defy time and proverbs. Such a hero is always abnormal: either the first symptoms of some nervous disease are beginning to show themselves, or some other less subtle change is occurring in his body. His position is very much like that of a lady who, after the climacteric, observes that what she thinks to be the normal periodical discharge has returned; she does not know that this is often the first sign of cancer of the womb, and that what she thinks to be rejuvenescence is really often her death-warrant. Youth never returns; the tale of years is inexorable. It is lucky for the old man if he has some faithful friend who will guard him, and, as is said euphemistically, “keep him out of mischief”—that is to say, keep him from catching syphilis, which is a terrible thing in old age, or at any age. The old man thus afflicted seems absolutely to go mad about women; dignity, honour, decency, and all else, are forgotten.