Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub
[graphic][merged small][ocr errors]
[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][ocr errors][ocr errors]
[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Ir has been remarked by Sismondi, that the effect of the Salic law in the succession of a kingdom is to render the royal family more strictly national, while one in which female succession is allowed is perpetually exposed to the chance of receiving a foreign dynasty. Of the long line of kings of France, every one was a Frenchman, while England and Spain have each been more than once transferred to foreign rulers through the operation of the contrary law. But it is a curious circumstance, that whenever this has occurred in England, it has never taken place through

1. The Lives of the Queens of England, &c. By Agnes Strickland. Vols. VI., VII. London. 1843. 2. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, K.G., &c. By Sir Harris Nicolas,

G.C.M.G. London. 1847.

3. The Romance of the Peerage, or Curiosities of the Family History. By George Lillie Craik. Vols. I., II. London. 1848.

4. Lives and Letters of the Devereux Earls of Essex, &c. By the Hon. Walter Bouchier Devereux.

2 vols. London. 1853.

The Plantagenet succession was hardly an exception; Matilda can be barely counted as a queenregnant: and her husband and son were not more

foreign to the English nation than the existing royal family.

VOL. XXXIII.-NO. II.

the marriage of a queen-regnant, but always through that of some princess not in the immediate line of succession, whose posterity has appeared to claim the throne after several generations. Probably few persons seriously dreamed that the union of Margaret of England with James of Scotland would lead to that of the two British kingdoms under one sceptre; still fewer doubtless imagined, when the decorous Palsgrave carried off his laughing bride from the court of their first common sovereign, that within a century both realms would receive as their king the prince of a German state of which few Englishmen in those days had heard the name. But none of the queens-regnant who have preceded her present Majesty can be made responsible for the good or the evil of introducing new blood into the royal line. Two, indeed-if we count, as is hardly fair, the second Mary, three -of their number were married to foreign princes, but none left surviving issue, only one bore children at all. The present heirapparent is the first who has derived the title of Prince of Wales from a maternal parent. And Elizabeth, the greatest of our queens, and one of the greatest of our sovereigns,

10

desired no worthier epitaph than that "she | Lewis and Hugh Capet, or more recent date lived and died a Virgin Queen."

But more than this, two among our queensregnant have been conspicuously national sovereigns. The last Tudor and the last Stuart, the daughter of Henry VIII. and the daughter of James II., were the last of our rulers who were English by both parents. Their maternal ancestry was not drawn from kings and kaisers, but from simple English subjects, and those of no very exalted rank or pedigree. Both were indeed the daughters of peers, but neither Anne Boleyn nor Queen Anne was born in the peerage; the former indeed was doubtless the cause of her father's elevation. The whole dynasty to which Elizabeth belonged was one under which royalty was more thoroughly national than it had been for many centuries before, or than it has ever been since. The marriage of the Duke of York with Anne Hyde was looked on as something strange, and almost monstrous; but such was not the feeling a century earlier. The royal personages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries intermarried more habitually with Englishmen and Englishwomen than those of any subsequent age, or indeed of any preceding one since the Norman Conquest. It was the point of time most favorable to such a practice. The last vestiges of its foreigħ origin had just been wiped away from the dynasty, and the aristo cracy founded by the Conqueror; the system of modern European politics which regards all crowned heads as forming a distinct caste, intermarrying only within their own august circle, was not as yet fully established. In England again especially, the constant revolutions and changes of the succession brought the crown within the reach of remote branches of the royal family, who had nothing but their genealogy to distinguish them from the rest of the nobility of the realm. Anyhow, the pedigree of Queen Elizabeth would have appeared painfully defective in the eyes of a German herald. She would have been utterly unable to make out her sixteen quarterings of royal or even noble dignity. We have oftener to pick our way through the obscure genealogies of rustic knights and plodding citizens than along the magnificent series of the Percies or the De Veres. As if to mock every notion of the kind, when any unusually illustrious name does appear, it is the result of some strange mesalliance which drew attention even at the time. Elizabeth's grotesque title of Queen of France might have been backed up by a lineal, though not male, connection with St.

[ocr errors]

than her descent from the "she-wolf," from whom that fantastic claim was originally derived; but this was only because a handsome Welsh gentleman had pleased the eye of a daughter of France, the widow of the conqueror of Agincourt. In tracing her direct royal descent through the contending houses whose claims had centred in her father, we shall not find a foreign ancestor until the two lines converge in a pair of whom any nation would have been proud, Edward of England and Philippa of Hainault. It is impossible to doubt that this thorough nationality of the Tudor and later Plantagenet sovereigns had something to do with the popularity with which they were almost always surrounded.

Before and after, England had kings-Normans, Scots, or Germans-ignorant of her language, or careless of her interests: during this very period Mary lost perhaps more of the national affection by her Spanish marriage, than by a whole hecatomb of martyrs; but Henry VIII. and his younger daughter, whatever else they were, good or bad, were the thoroughly English offspring of English parents, identified in every point of language, habits, and feelings with the common mass of their people, who saw in their ruler only the most exalted of their own number, and did not abhor the despotism of one who was felt to be the true impersonation of the national character.

While both father and daughter were alike the objects of popular attachment during their lifetime, the daughter alone has retained the affection of posterity. In fact, we find it no easy matter to believe that our eighth Harry could ever have been a popular monarch. The England, however, of those days was used to see royal and noble blood poured out upon the scaffold; and there seems reason to believe that the strange compounds of religions which he devised harmonized well with the feeling of his day. Men rejoiced to get rid of the never-failing grievance of the Pope's supremacy, and of some of the grosser practical delusions and superstitions; but the mass of mankind in all ages are alike attached to the religious ceremonies to which they are accustomed, and heedless about theological dogmas which they do not comprehend. Such a state of mind was exactly met by the church of Henry VIII.: national and regal vanity were alike flattered by the erection of an insular Pope in the royal person; men's senses were no longer insulted by the Rood of Boxly or the holy phial of Hales; but the divine might still maintain the orthodox faith of pontiffs

« ПредишнаНапред »