The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863

Of all the royal races of the Middle Ages, no one stands out more boldly on the historic page than the Plantagenets, who ruled over England from 1154 to 1485, the line of descent being frequently broken, and family quarrels constantly occurring. They were a bold and an able race, and if they had possessed a closer resemblance to the Hapsburgs, they would have become masters of Western Europe; but their quarrelsome disposition more than undid all that they could effect through the exercise of their talents. On the female side they were descended from the Conqueror; and, as we have seen, the Conqueror's family was one in which sons rebelled against the fathers, and brother fought with brother. Matilda, daughter of Henry I., became the wife of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, and from their union came Henry II., first of the royal Plantagenets. Now the Angevine Plantagenets were "a hard set," as we should say in these days. Dissensions were common enough in the family, and they descended to the offspring of Geoffrey and Matilda, being in fact intensified by the elevation of the House to a throne. Henry II. married Eleanora of Aquitaine, one of the greatest matches of those days, a marriage which has had great effect on modern history. The Aquitanian House was as little distinguished for the practice of the moral virtues as were the lines of Anjou and Normandy. One of the Countesses of Anjou was reported to be a demon, which probably meant only that her husband had caught a Tartar in marrying her; but the story was enough to satisfy the credulous people of those times, who, very naturally, considering their conduct, believed that the Devil was constant in his attention to their affairs. It was to this lady that Richard Cocur de Lion referred, when he said, speaking of the family contentions, "Is it to be wondered at, that, coming from such a source, we live ill with one another? What comes from the Devil must to the Devil return." With such an origin on his father's side, crossing the fierce character of his mother, Henry II. thought he could not do better than marry Eleanora, whose origin was almost as bad as his own. Her grandfather had been a "fast man" in his youth and middle life, and it was not until he had got nigh to seventy that he began to think that it was time to repent. He had taken Eleanora's grandmother from her husband, and a pious priest had said to them, "Nothing good will be born to you," which prediction the event justified. The old gentleman resigned his rich dominions, supposed to be the best in Europe, to his grand-daughter, and she married Louis VII., King of France, and accompanied him in the crusade that he was so foolish as to take part in. She had women-warriors, who did their cause immense mischief; and unless she has been greatly scandalized, she made her husband fit for heaven in a manner approved neither by the law nor the gospel. The Provençal ladies had no prejudices against Saracens. After her return to Europe, she got herself divorced from Louis, and married Henry Plantagenet, who was much her junior, she having previously been the mistress of his father. It was a mariage de convenance, and, as is sometimes the case with such marriages, it turned out very inconveniently for both parties to it. It was not unfruitful, but all the fruit it produced was bad, and to the husband and father that fruit became the bitterest of bitter ashes. No romancer would have dared to bring about such a scries of unions as led to the creation of Plantagenet royalty, and to so much misery as well as greatness. There is no exaggeration in Michelet's lively picture of the Plantagenets. "In this family," he says, "it was a succession of bloody wars and treacherous treaties. Once, when King Henry had met his sons in a conference, their soldiers drew upon him. This conduct was traditionary in the two Houses of Anjou and Normandy. More than once had the children of William the Conqueror and Henry II. pointed their swords against their father's breast. Fulk had placed his foot on the neck of his vanquished son. The jealous Eleanora, with the passion and vindictiveness of her Southern blood, encouraged her sons' disobedience, and trained them to parricide. These youths, in whose veins mingled the blood of so many different races,—Norman, Saxon, and Aquitanian,—seemed to entertain, over and above the violence of the Fulks of Anjou and the Williams of England, all the opposing hatreds and discords of those races. They never knew whether they were from the South or the North: they only knew that they hated one another, and their father worse than all. They could not trace back their ancestry, without finding, at each descent, or rape, or incest, or parricide." Henry II. quarrelled with all his sons, and they all did him all the mischief they could, under the advice and direction of their excellent mother, whom Henry imprisoned. A priest once sought to effect a reconciliation between Henry and his son Geoffrey. He went to the Prince with a crucifix in his hand, and entreated him not to imitate Absalom.

"What!" exclaimed the Prince, "would you have me renounce my birthright?"

"God forbid!" answered the holy man; "I wish you to do nothing to your own injury."

"You do not understand my words," said Geoffrey; "it is our family fate not to love one another. 'T is our inheritance; and not one of us will ever forego it."

That must have been a pleasant family to marry into! When the King's eldest son, Henry, died, regretting his sins against his father, that father durst not visit him, fearing treachery; and the immediate occasion of the King's death was the discovery of the hostility of his son John, who, being the worst of his children, was, of course, the best-beloved of them all. The story was, that, when Richard entered the Abbey of Fontevraud, in which his father's body lay, the corpse bled profusely, which was held to indicate that the new king was his father's murderer. Richard was very penitent, as his elder brother Henry had been, on his death-bed. They were very sorrowful, were those Plantagenet princes, when they had been guilty of atrocious acts, and when it was too late for their repentance to have any practical effect.

Richard I. had no children, and so he could not get up a perfect family-quarrel, though he and his brother John were enemies. He died at forty-two, and but a few years after his marriage with Berengaria of Navarre, an English queen who never was in England. When on his death-bed, Richard was advised by the Bishop of Rouen to repent, and to separate himself from his children. "I have no children," the King answered. But the good priest told him that he had children, and that they were avarice, luxury, and pride. "True," said Richard, who was a humorist,—"and I leave my avarice to the Cistercians, my luxury to the Gray Friars, and my pride to the Templars." History has fewer sharper sayings than this, every word of which told like a cloth-yard shaft sent against a naked bosom. Richard certainly never quarrelled with the children whom he thus left to his friends.

King John did not live long enough to illustrate the family character by fighting with his children. When he died, in 1216, his eldest son, Henry III., was but nine years old, and even a Plantagenet could not well fall out with a son of that immature age. However, John did his best to make his mark on his time. If he could not quarrel with his children, because of their tender years, he, with a sense of duty that cannot be too highly praised, devoted his venom to his wife. He was pleased to suspect her of being as regardless of marriage-vows as he had been himself, and so he hanged her supposed lover over her bed, with two others, who were suspected of being their accomplices. The Queen was imprisoned. On their being reconciled, he stinted her wardrobe, a refinement of cruelty that was aggravated by his monstrous expenditure on his own ugly person. Queen Isabella was very handsome, and perhaps John was of the opinion of some modern husbands, who think that dress extinguishes beauty as much as it inflames bills. Having no children to torment, John turned his disagreeable attentions to his nephew, Arthur, Duke of Brittany, who, according to modern ideas, was the lawful King of England. The end was the end of Arthur. How he was disposed of is not exactly known, but, judging from John's character and known actions, we incline to agree with those writers who say that the uncle slew the nephew with his own royal hand. He never could deny himself an attainable luxury, and to him the murder of a youthful relative must have been a rich treat, and have created for him a new sensation, something like the new pleasure for which the Persian king offered a great reward. Besides, all uncles are notoriously bad, and seem, indeed, to have been made only for the misery of their nephews and nieces, of whose commands they are most reprehensibly negligent. We mean to write a book, one of these days, for the express purpose of showing what a mistake it was to allow any such relationship to exist, and tracing all the evil that ever has afflicted humanity to the innate wickedness of uncles, and requiring their extirpation. We err, then, on the safe side, in supposing that John despatched Arthur himself,—not to say, that, when you require that a delicate piece of work should be done, you must do it with your own hand, or you may be disappointed. John did the utmost that he could do to keep up the discredit of the family; for, when a man has no son to whip and to curse, he should not be severely censured for having done no more than to kill his nephew. Men of large and charitable minds will take all the circumstances of John's case into the account, and not allow their judgment of his conduct to be harsh. What better can a man do than his worst?

Henry III. appears to have managed to live without quarrelling with his children; but then he was a poor creature, and even was so unkingly, and so little like what a Plantagenet should have been, that he actually disliked war! He might with absolute propriety have worn the lowly broom-corn from which his family-name was taken, while it was a sweeping satire on almost all others who bore it. His heir, Edward I., was a king of "high stomach," and as a prince he stood stoutly by his father in the baronial wars. He, too, though the father of sixteen children, dispensed with family dissensions, thus showing that "The more, the merrier," is a true saying. Edward II. came to grief from having a bad wife, Isabella of France, who made use of his son against him. That son was Edward III., who became king in his father's lifetime, and whose marriage with Philippa of Hainault is one of the best-known facts of history, not only because it was an uncommonly happy marriage, but that it had remarkable consequences. This royal couple got along very happily with their children; but the ambition of their fourth son, the Duke of Lancaster, troubled the last days of the King, and prepared the way for great woes in the next century. The King was governed by Lancaster, and the Black Prince, who was then in a dying state, was at the head of what would now be called the Opposition, as if he foresaw what evils his brother's ambition would be the means of bringing upon his son.

Richard II., son of the Black Prince, had no children, though he was twice married. He was dethroned, the rebels being headed by his cousin, Henry of Lancaster, who became Henry IV. Thus was brought about that change in the course of descent which John of Gaunt seems to have aimed at, but which he died just too soon to see effected. It was a violent change, and one which had its origin in a family quarrel, added to political dissatisfaction. Had the revolutionist wished merely to set aside a bad king, they would have called the House of Mortimer to the throne, the chief member of that House being the next heir, as descended from the Duke of Clarence, elder brother of the Duke of Lancaster; but more was meant than a political revolution, and so the line of Clarence was passed over, and its right to the crown treated with neglect, to be brought forward in bloody fashion in after-days. In fact, the Englishmen who made Henry of Lancaster king prepared the way for that long and terrible struggle which took place in the fifteenth century, and which was, its consequences as well as its course considered, the greatest civil war that has ever afflicted Christendom. The movement that led to the elevation of Henry of Holingbroke to the throne, though not precisely a palace-revolution, resembles a revolution of that kind more than anything else with which it can be compared; and it was as emphatic a departure from the principle of hereditary right as can be found in history. So much was this the case, that liberals in polities mostly place their historical sympathies with the party of the Red Rose, for no other reason, that we have ever been able to see, than that the House of Lancaster's possession of the throne testified to the triumph of revolutionary principles; for that House was jealous of its power and cruel in the exercise of it, and was so far from being friendly to the people, that it derived its main support from the aristocracy, and was the ally of the Church in the harsh work of exterminating the Lollards. The House of York, on the other hand, while it had, to use modern words, the legitimate right to the throne, was a popular House, and represented and embodied whatever there was then existing in politics that could be identified with the idea of progress.

The character of the troubles that existed between Henry IV. and his eldest son and successor, Shakspeare's Prince Hal, is involved in much obscurity. It used to be taken for granted that the poet's Prince was an historical character, but that is no longer the case,—Falstaff's royal associate being now regarded in the same light in which Falstaff himself is regarded. The one is a poetic creation, and so is the other. Prince Henry was neither a robber nor a rowdy, but from his early youth a much graver character than most men are in advanced life. He had great faults, but they were not such as are made to appear in the pages of the player. The hero of Agincourt was a mean fellow,—a tyrant, a persecutor, a false friend and a cruel enemy, and the wager of most unjust wars; but he was not the "fast" youth that he has been generally drawn. He had neither the good nor the bad qualities that belong to young gentlemen who do not live on terms with their papas. He was of a grave and sad temperament, and much more of a Puritan than a Cavalier. It is a little singular that Shakspeare should have given portraits so utterly false of the most unpopular of the kings of the York family, and of the most popular of the kings of the rival house,—of Richard III., that is, and of the fifth Henry of Lancaster. Neither portrait has any resemblance to the original, a point concerning which the poet probably never troubled himself, as his sole purpose was to make good acting plays. Had it been necessary to that end to make Richard walk on three legs, or Henry on one leg, no doubt he would have done so,—just as Monk Lewis said he would have made Lady Angela blue, in his "Castle Spectre," if by such painting he could have made the play more effective. Prince Henry was a very precocious youth, and had the management of great affairs when he was but a child, and when it would have been better for his soul's and his body's health, had he been engaged in acting as an esquire of some good knight, and subjected to rigid discipline. The jealousy that his father felt was the natural consequence of the popularity of the Prince, who was young, and had highly distinguished himself in both field and council, was not a usurper, and was not held responsible for any of the unpopular acts done by the Government of his father. They were at variance not long before Henry IV.'s death, but little is known as to the nature of their quarrels. The crown scene, in which the Prince helps himself to the crown while his father is yet alive, is taken by Shakspeare from Monstrelet, who is supposed to have invented all that he narrates in order to weaken the claim of the English monarch to the French throne. If Henry IV., when dying, could declare that he had no right to the crown of England, on what could Henry V. base his claim to that of France?

Henry V. died before his only son, Henry VI., had completed his first year; and Henry VI. was early separated from his only son, Edward of Lancaster, the same who was slain while flying from the field of Tewkesbury, at the age of eighteen. There was, therefore, no opportunity for quarrels between English kings and their sons for the sixty years that followed the death of Henry IV.; but there was much quarrelling, and some murdering, in the royal family, in those years,—brothers and other relatives being fierce rivals, even unto death, and zealous even unto slaying of one another. It would be hard to say of what crime those Plantagenets were not guilty.1 Edward IV., with whom began the brief ascendency of the House of York, died at forty-one, after killing his brother of Clarence, his eldest son being but twelve years old. He had no opportunity to have troubles with his boys, and he loved women too well to fall out with his daughters, the eldest of whom was but just turned of seventeen. The history of Edward IV. is admirably calculated to furnish matter for a sermon on the visitation of the sins of parents on their children. He had talent enough to have made himself master of Western Europe, but he followed a life of debauchery, by which he was cut off in his prime, leaving a large number of young children to encounter the worst of fortunes. Both of his sons disappeared, whether murdered by Richard III. or Henry VII. no one can say; and his daughters had in part to depend upon that bastard slip of the Red-Rose line, Henry VII., for the means to enable them to live as gentlewomen,—all but the eldest, whom Henry took to wife as a point of policy, which her father would have considered the greatest misfortune of all those that befell his offspring. Richard III's only legitimate son died a mere boy.

The Tudors fame to the English throne in 1485. There was no want of domestic quarrelling with them. Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son, died young, but left a widow, Catharine of Aragon, whom the King treated badly; and he appears to have been jealous of the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry VIII., but died too soon to allow of that jealousy's blooming into quarrels. According to some authorities, the Prince thought of seizing the crown, on the ground that it belonged to him in right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, who was unquestionably the legitimate heir. Henry VIII. himself, who would have made a splendid tyrant over a son who should have readied to man's estate,—an absolute model in that way to all after-sovereigns,—was denied by fortune an opportunity to round and perfect his character as a domestic despot. Only one of his legitimate sons lived even to boyhood, Edward VI., and Henry died when the heir-apparent was in his tenth year. Of his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, Henry was extravagantly fond, and at one time thought of making him heir-apparent, which might have been done, for the English dread of a succession war was then at its height. Richmond died in his seventeenth year. Having no sons of a tormentable age, Henry made his daughters as unhappy as he could make them by the harsh exercise of paternal authority, and bastardized them both, in order to clear the way to the throne for his son. Edward VI. died a bachelor, in his sixteenth year, so that we can say nothing of him as a parent; but he treated his sister Mary with much harshness, and exhibited on various occasions a disposition to have things his own way that would have delighted his father, provided it had been directed against anybody but that severe old gentleman himself. Mary I. was the best sovereign of her line, domestically considered; but then she had neither son nor daughter with whom to quarrel, and the difficulties she had with her half-sister, Elizabeth, like the differences between the Archangel Michael and the Fallen Angel, were purely political in their character. We do not think that she would have done much injustice, if she had made Elizabeth's Tower-dungeon the half-way house to the scaffold. But though political, the half-sisterly dissensions between these ladies serve to keep Mary I. within the rules of the royal houses to which she belonged. Mary, dying of the loss of Calais and the want of children, was succeeded by Elizabeth, who, being a maiden queen, had no issue with whom to make issue concerning things political or personal. But observe how basely she treated her relatives, those poor girls, the Greys, Catharine and Mary, sisters of poor Lady Jane, whose fair and clever head Mary I. had taken off. The barren Queen, too jealous to share her power with a husband, hated marriage with all "the sour malevolence of antiquated virginity," and was down upon the Lady Catharine and the Lady Mary because they chose to become wives. Then she imprisoned her cousin, Mary Stuart, for nineteen years, and finally had her butchered under an approach to the forms of law, and in total violation of its spirit. She, too, kept within the royal rules, and made herself as great a pest as possible to her relatives.

The English throne passed to the House of Stuart in 1603, and, after a lapse of six-and-fifty years, England had a sovereign with sons and daughters, the first since the death of Henry VIII. at the beginning of 1547. There was little opportunity for family dissensions in the days of most of the Stuarts, as either political troubles of the most serious nature absorbed the attention of kings and princes, or the reigning monarchs had no legitimate children. The open quarrel between Charles I. and the Parliament began before his eldest son had completed his eleventh year; and after that quarrel had increased to war, and it was evident that the sword alone could decide the issue, the King parted with his son forever. They had no opportunity to become rivals, and to fall out. There is so much that can be said against Charles I. with truth, that it is pleasing—as are most novelties—to be able to mention something to his credit. Instead of being jealous of his son, or desiring to keep him in ignorance of affairs, he early determined to train him to business. According to Clarendon, he said that he wished to "unboy him." Therefore he conferred high military offices upon him before he had completed his fifteenth year; and sent him to the West of England, to be the nominal head of the Western Association. Charles II. had no legitimate children, and so he could not have any quarrels with a Prince of Wales. He was fond of his numerous bastards, and, like an affectionate royal father, provided handsomely for them at the public-expense. What more could a father do, situated as that father was, and always in want of his people's money? Some of them were not his sons,—Monmouth, the best beloved of them all, being the son of Robert Sidney, a brother of the renowned Algernon, a fact that partially excuses the harsh conduct of James II. toward his nominal nephew. James II. had no legitimate son until the last year of his reign; but his two eldest daughters treated him far worse than any sovereign of the Hanoverian line was ever used by a son. They were most respectable women, and their deficiency in piety has worked well for the world; but it must ever be repugnant to humanity to regard the conduct of Mary and Anne with respect. No wonder that people called Mary the modern Tullia. Mary II. died young, and childless; and Queen Anne, though a most prolific wife, and but fifty-one at her death, survived all her children. Anne believed that her children's deaths were sent in punishment of her unfilial conduct; and she would have restored her nephew, the Pretender, to the British throne, but that the Jacobites were the silliest political creatures that ever triumphed in the how-not-to-do-it business, and could not even hold their mouths open for the rich and ripened fruit to drop into them.

The first of the English Stuarts, James I., is suspected of having allowed his jealousy of his eldest son, the renowned Prince Henry, to carry him to the extent of child-murder. The Stuarts are called the Fated Line, and it is certain that none of their number, from Robert II.—who got the Scottish throne in virtue of his veins containing a portion of the blood of the Bruce, and so regalized the family, which, like the Bruces, was of Norman origin, and originally Fitzalan by name—to Charles Edward, and the Cardinal York, who died but yesterday, as it were, but had a wonderful run of bad luck. They had capital cards, but they knew not how to play them. With them, to play was to lose, and the most fortunate of their number were those kings who played as little as they could, such as James I. and Charles II. Those who lost the most were those who played the hardest, as Charles I. and his second son, James II. Yet the family was a clever one, with strong traits, both of character and talent, that ought to have made it the most successful of ruling races, and would have made it so, if its chiefs could have learned to march with the times. They had to contend, in Scotland, with one of the fiercest and most unprincipled aristocracies that ever tried the patience and traversed the purposes of monarchs who really aimed at the good government of their people; and the idiosyncrasy contracted during more than two centuries of Scottish rule clung to the family after it went to England, and found itself living under altogether a different state of things. What was virtue in Scotland became vice in England; and the ultra-monarchists, who came into existence not long after James I. succeeded to Elizabeth, helped to spoil the Stuarts. Both James and his successor were dominated by Scotch traditions, and supposed that they were contending with men who had the same end in view that had been regarded by the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the Ruthvens, the Lindsays, and others of the old Scotch baronage. What helped to deceive them was this,—that their opponents in England, like the opponents of their ancestors in Scotland, were aristocrats; and they supposed, that, as aristocratical movements in their Northern kingdom had always been subversive of order and peace, the same kind of movements would produce similar results in their Southern kingdom. They could not understand that one aristocracy may differ much from another, and that, while in Scotland the interest of the people, or rather of the whole nation, required the exaltation of the kingly power, in England it was that exaltation which was most to be feared. Sufficient allowance has not been made for the Stuarts in this respect, little regard being paid to the effect of the family's long training at home, which had rendered hostility to the nobility second nature to it. Had the Stuarts been the supporters of liberal ideas in England, their conduct would have given the lie to every known principle of human action. As their distrust of aristocracy rendered them despotically disposed, because the Scotch aristocracy had been the most lawless of mankind, so did they become attached to the Church of England because of the tyranny they had seen displayed by the Church of Scotland, the most illiberal ecclesiastical body, in those times, that men had ever seen, borne with, or suffered from. James I. and his grandson Charles II. had their whole conduct colored, and dyed in the wool, too, by their recollections of the odious treatment to which they had been subjected by a harsh and intolerant clergy. They had not the magnanimity to overlook, in the day of their power, what they had suffered in the day of their weakness.