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lations of religion, when flowing from a source to which her training, and we are willing to believe, her conscience also had attached her, she seems to have been decidedly opposed to the enjoyment of the same advantages by others, who sought them in a different manner. Wherever her authority extended, it appears that her proselyting zeal was exercised, and her own family, as most nearly within its influence, were those who suffered most severely from it. Her course of conduct was not more discreditable to herself than injurious to the memory of the king; with whose wishes with regard to his children, and with whose injunctions to them, she was perfectly acquainted. She had from the beginning made up her mind to educate her youngest daughter, the princess Henrietta, in the Romish faith; and had, moreover, clandestinely endeavoured to subvert the principles of her daughter Mary, while the latter was a child, having gone so far as to give her a rosary and cross, and to teach her the use of them, desiring her to hide them in her pocket in this attempt, however, she failed. To the unnatural severities which she practised towards her youngest son, the Duke of Gloucester, after his father's death, she was principally stimulated, no doubt, by her confessor Montague (brother to the Earl of Manchester, the Lord Kimbolton of the civil war), who had been perverted to popery by the Jesuits, during a former stay in France; a furious papist, like all other renegades, violent and unscrupulous. By the advice, and with the assistance of this priest, the queen proceeded, according to the prescriptive usages of popery, first by cajolery and casuistry, and then by persecution, to attempt the conversion-so-called-of the young duke of Gloucester. But, though quite a boy, the duke had a conscience and a spirit, and neither casuistry, nor the promise of a cardinal's hat, nor persecution, could bend his neck to the yoke of Rome. His unnatural mother and her Luciferian confessor' proceeded so far as to threaten the young duke with the maternal malediction (he was a dutiful and affectionate son, and this was therefore a poisoned arrow aimed at his peace of mind), and they actually dismantled his lodgings during his absence, forbade his household to prepare his food, turned his horses out of the stables, and himself into the street, without a sòu; and the Earl of Ormond, the attached friend of his father, was obliged to part with the last jewel he possessed to procure the necessaries of life for the son of his old master. They were about to immure him in the Jesuits' college, that, to adopt the phraseology of those candid and veracious fathers, he might be tamed;' a consummation which they were accustomed to bring about, by means of so unscrupulous a nature, that not only the will, but the intellect itself was oftentimes

subverted by the process;-when the dispute was terminated by a letter from Charles II. (who had assumed that title on his father's death, and was then residing at Cologne), in which he demanded that the young duke should be given up to him as his brother and subject, a requisition which neither Montague nor the queen could venture to refuse. Charles appears to have been at that time steadily attached to the Church of England, His multiplied enormities had not, as yet, made it a matter of necessity that he should be provided with a religion which would wipe out his sins as fast as he committed them.

Henrietta returned to England after the restoration of her son, and would, to all appearance, have fixed her permanent residence in this country, had not her health prevented it. Her complaint appears to have been an affection of the lungsprobably of the asthmatic kind-for which the warmer and purer atmosphere of France was at least a palliative, though not a cure. She had, however, the worldly wisdom to remain in England till her jointure, as queen dowager, had been secured to her, and until her youngest daughter had been portioned by the country, previous to her marriage with the Duke of Orleans, the younger brother of Louis XIV.

Miss Strickland has taken a very favourable view of the character of Henrietta Maria throughout, and appears to us to have laid rather too great a stress on the testimony of the authors of the inedited manuscripts from which she quotes so largely. Père Cyprian Gamache-one of her principal authorities-a Capuchin priest, attached to the queen's household both in France and England, may have been a worthy man, and an honest ecclesiastic; and Madame de Motteville may have had opportunities of observing the character and actions of Henrietta; and both may have written without any intention of flattering the royal object of their encomiums; or the most remote idea that their manuscripts would ever see the light; but the former evidently considered his mistress as half a saint at least, on account of her injudicious and bigoted attachment to her religion, and the obstinacy with which she paraded it in the eyes of the English people, regardless of all consequences. What reliance can be placed on the judgment of a man, who has recorded in so many words his opinion, that Providence had ordained the troubles of the civil wars, the removal of the king by a violent death, and the dispersion of his family, solely in order that the queen might have the power and opportunity, in spite of her solemn promises to her husband, to educate her youngest and favourite daughter as a Roman-catholic? Objections to the same purpose, though differing in kind, might be urged against the panegyrics of Madame de Motteville, had

we time and space to make them, but we have not; they will suggest themselves to Miss Strickland's readers.

A graver fault, and one which it is necessary to notice, attaches to this narrative: the one-sided view of the character of Charles, which Miss Strickland has thought proper to present. To one unacquainted with history, and who should take his opinions solely from the biography before us, that monarch would appear to have been the best man and king that ever existed. Every thing connected with the latter part of his life, his sufferings, his trial, and his death, are given at length, and dilated on; together with a running accompaniment throughout in praise of his domestic character; while his political tyranny, his crimes, and his utter faithlessness, which made his death a matter of apparent necessity, are never once adverted to. We do not justify his death in a legal point of view; but, he had annihilated law as regarded others, and could not recreate it to preserve himself. It was by power beyond and without the law that he had ruled the nation; and the only way to put him down was to fight him with his own weapon. Nobody disputes that in his own family he was what he should have been; but was he therefore to be allowed to carry oppression and ruin and devastation into all others, at his pleasure? A very pathetic account is given of his parting from his family before his execution. Why did not Miss Strickland give as a counterpart to this, his treatment of Sir John Elliott and his family? The sole offence of that gentleman was words spoken in parliament, where he had a right to speak them; and for this he was closely imprisoned in a place unsuited to his health, (the Tower) and kept there, notwithstanding his petition for a change of prison, till he died by inches; and when his wife and family petitioned the king and martyr at least to bestow on them the dead body of their husband and father, that they might bury it with his ancestors, he refused their prayer, and wrote his refusal on the back of their petition with his own hand. He did not then anticipate the possibility that his own measure might be meted to himself; but what right had such a man to complain, when his poisoned chalice was returned to his own lips ?*

In another instance, page 116, et seq., a still more unwarrantable course has been adopted; a long quotation is given from the Eikon Basilike, in which Charles is represented as giving a description of the virtues of his queen, and setting forth his own feelings respecting her, and this description is clenched by the following comment :

* The Christian king and martyr also refused forgiveness to his executioner, who knelt on the scaffold to ask it.—p. 173.

'Surely, surely, every woman must feel that it was a brighter lot to have been loved and mourned for by a man, whose mind was capable of these feelings, than to have shared the empire of a world, with a common character, in common place prosperity.'-p. 118. It is doubtful whether the mind of Charles was capable of these feelings; a quotation from the Eikon Basilike, is, at least, no proof that it was so. It is now established almost beyond the possibility of doubt, that not a syllable of the Eikon was written by Charles; Miss Strickland ought to have been aware of this; and, even if the matter were far more doubtful than it is, she has no right to promote a controverted opinion into an undoubted fact, and then to argue from it as such, to suit her own purposes.* The whole matter amounts to this; that Miss Strickland should have left untouched the character of Charles, or, have given both sides of it. She should have exhibited the aspect with which he looked upon the nation, or not have given that which he turned upon his queen and family and in both cases, she should have used legitimate means and none other.

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We intended the last sentence for the conclusion of our remarks on this part of the volume; but our eye has glanced again on a copy of verses, which Miss Strickland has given as one of the many elegies written on the death of Charles, and which she calls valuable;' which proves, beyond all doubt, that however the royalists might charge on their opponents (and, in many individual instances, perhaps justly), a want of real religious feeling, they were far from having a superabundance of it themselves. This elegy is neither more nor less than a parallel between Charles 1. and—our Saviour! The place of the King's execution was 'Golgotha;' the Protector's lady was 'Pilate's wife; he (Charles) was sent to death by the cry of 'crucify,' and condemned because it was expedient he should die;' while, to make his sufferings 'more complete,' more like our Saviour's, we presume, 'he suffered, too, without the gate!' meaning Holbein's gate, at Whitehall. Whatever Miss Strickland may think of this, we think it blasphemous, and are at some loss to imagine where her moral perceptions could have been sleeping, when she copied such a thing for the press with commendation.

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The remaining part of the volume is occupied by the life of Catharine of Braganza, queen of Charles 11. There is no tragic

By the bye, why does Miss Strickland write Basilicon? It is somewhat pedantic in a lady to alter the received title of the work, and that which its author gave it. Prynne's Histriomastrix' is also spoken of in four or five different places; in almost every one of them it is spelt dif ferently, and in all wrong.

interest in her story, but much of quiet pathos and domestic feeling. It was not the enemies of the king that embittered the life of his consort,-unless, indeed, he may be called his own enemy, for the contrivers of the popish plot were not the enemies of the king. But for his own faults and follies he might have enjoyed an average degree of happiness in the society of his consort; perhaps even more; and the devoted affection which she felt and expressed for him, would lead us to believe that the possession of his heart would have been all that was necessary for her. This, however, she never had, or, but for a little time; yet, when her life was aimed at by the patrons of Titus Oates, the king's honour and his conscience were so far roused, that he became her detetermined and consistent protector.

This, if not the most uneasy, was the most dangerous portion of the life of Catharine; yet, even then, the evil approached her in such a shape, that it did but call forth, though in a greater degree, the same virtues which she before exhibited, the true womanly virtues of quiet resignation and passive heroism. Her conduct throughout appears to have been swayed by three principal motives;-her love for Charles, which continued to the last; her attachment to her religion, which, though amounting to bigotry, yet took no overt or offensive shape; and her deep and commendable interest in the welfare of her family and of her native country, which had just struggled into independence. She appears also to have been of a disposition radically and exceedingly amiable; and these different agencies, when borne in mind, may elucidate and account for some apparent discrepancies and weaknesses in her conduct.

She needed all the motives which personal affection, or religion, or patriotism could supply, to enable her to conduct herself with dignified forbearance in the difficult position which she occupied. Placed as she was, in the society of those to whose ill-will her very virtues rendered her obnoxious; and cast for protection on a man whose principles habitually succumbed before his passions; whose affections were engaged to another before he saw his wife; and could not, or would not, be withdrawn from this unworthy object, at least not for a long time, and then only to be bestowed on others as unworthy; far from her native country, and among a people who looked on her religion, and on her as professing it, with no friendly eye; she yet conducted herself in such a manner as to secure the respect and esteem of all but the profligate associates of her husband. His own esteem she had, though nothing more; for, as he himself said truly, though he was not virtuous, he could respect those who were.' And he afterwards gave undoubted proof that

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