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

James I. undoubtedly disliked his eldest son, and was jealous of him; but it is by no means clear that he killed him, or caused him to be killed. He used to say of him, "What! will he bury me alive?" He ordered that the court should not go into mourning for Henry, a circumstance that makes in his favor, as murderers are apt to affect all kinds of hypocrisy in regard to their victims, and to weep in weeds very copiously. Yet his conduct may have been a refinement of hypocrisy, and, though a coward in the common acceptation of the word, James had much of that peculiar kind of hardihood which enables its possessor to treat commonly received ideas with contempt. His conduct in "The Great Oyer of Poisoning" was most extraordinary, it must be allowed, and is not reconcilable with innocence; but it does not follow that the guilt which the great criminals in that business could have established as against James related only to the death of Henry. It bore harder upon the King than even that crime could have borne, and must have concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have ears that are less delicate. It was in Somerset's power to explain James's conduct respecting some things that puzzled his contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants; but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that might have led to their ascendency thirty years earlier than it came to pass in the reign of his son. James was capable of almost any crime or baseness; but in the matter of poisoning his eldest son he is entitled to the Scotch verdict of Not Proven .

Whether James killed his son or not, it is certain that the Prince's death was a matter of extreme importance. Henry was one of those characters who are capable of giving history a twist that shall last forever. He had a fondness for active life, was very partial to military pursuits, and was friendly to those opinions which the bigoted chiefs of Austria and Bavaria were soon to combine to suppress. Henry would have come to the throne in 1625, had he lived, and there seems no reason to doubt that he would have anticipated the part which Gustavus Adolphus played a few years later. He would have made himself the champion of Protestantism, and not the less readily because his sister, the Electress-Palatine and Winter-Queen of Bohemia, would have been benefited by his successes in war. Bohemia might have become the permanent possession of the Palatine, and Protestantism have maintained its hold on Southern Germany, had Henry lived and reigned, and had his conduct as a king justified the hopes and expectations that were created by his conduct as a prince. The House of Austria would in that case have had a very different career from that which it has had since 1625, when Ferdinand II. was preparing so much evil for the future of Europe. Had Henry returned from Continental triumphs at the head of a great and an attached army, what could have prevented him from establishing arbitrary power in his insular dominions? His brother failed to make himself absolute, because he had no army, and was personally unpopular; but Henry would have had an army, and one, too, that would have stood high in English estimation, because of what it had done for the English name and the Protestant religion in Germany,—and Henry himself would have been popular, as a successful military man is sure to be in any country. Pym and Hampden would have found him a very different man to deal with from his foolish brother, who had all the love of despotism that man can have, but little of that kind of ability which enables a sovereign to reign despotically. Charles I. had no military capacity or taste, or he would have taken part in the Thirty Years' War, and in that way, and through the assistance of his army, have accomplished his domestic purpose. His tyranny was of a hard, iron character, unrelieved by a single ray of glory, but aggravated by much disgrace from the ill working of his foreign policy; so that it was well calculated to create the resistance which it encountered, and by which it was shivered to pieces. Henry would have gone to work in a different way, and, like Cromwell, would have given England glory, while taking from her freedom. There is nothing that the wearer of a crown cannot do, provided that crown is encircled with laurel. But the Stuarts seldom produced a man of military talent, which was a fortunate thing for their subjects, who would have lost their right to boast of their Constitutional polity, had Charles I. or James II. been a good soldier. We Americans, too, would have had a very different sort of annals to write, if the Stuarts, who have given so many names to American places, had known how to use that sword which they were so fond of handling.

The royal families of England did by no means monopolize the share of domestic dissensions set apart for kings. The House of Stuart, even before it ascended the English throne, and when it reigned over only poor, but stout Scotland, was anything but famous for the love of its fathers for their sons, or for its sons' love for their fathers; and dissensions were common in the royal family. Robert III., second king of the line, had great grief with his eldest son, the Duke of Rothsay; and the King's brother, the Duke of Albany, did much to increase the evil that had been caused by the loose life of the heir-apparent. The end was, that Rothsay was imprisoned, and then murdered by his uncle. Scott has used the details of this court-tragedy in his "Fair Maid of Perth," one of the best of his later novels, most of the incidents in which are strictly historical. James I. was murdered while he was yet young, and James II. lost his life at twenty-nine; but James III. lost both throne and life in a war that was waged against him in the name of his son, who became king in consequence of his father's defeat and death. When James IV. fell at Flodden, because he fought like a brave fool, and not like a skilful general, he left a son who was not three years old; and that son, James V., when he died, left a daughter, the hapless Mary Stuart, who was but a week old. There was not much room for quarrelling in either of these cases. Mary Stuart's son, then an infant, was made the head of the party that dethroned his mother, and forced her into that long exile that terminated in her murder by Elizabeth of England. Mary's quarrels with her husband, Darnley, were of so bitter a character as to create the belief that she caused him to be murdered,—a belief that is as common now as it was in the sixteenth century, though the Marian Controversy has been going on for wellnigh three hundred years, and it has been distinctly proved by a host of clever writers and skilful logicians that it was impossible for her to have had any thing to do with that summary act of divorce.

Several of the sovereigns of Continental Europe have had great troubles with their children, and these children have often had very disobedient fathers. In France, the Dauphin, afterward Louis XI., could not always keep on good terms with his father, Charles VII., who has the reputation of having restored the French monarchy, after the English had all but subverted it, Charles at one time being derisively called King of Bourges. Nothing annoyed Louis so much as being compelled to run away before the army which his father was leading against him. He would, he declared, have stayed and fought, but that he had not even half so many men as composed the royal force. He would have killed his father as readily as he killed his brother in after-days,—if he did kill his brother, of which there is some doubt, of which he should have the benefit. As was but natural, he was jealous of his son, though he died when that prince was thirteen. Owing to various causes, however, there have been fewer quarrels between French kings and their eldest sons than between English kings and their eldest sons. Few French monarchs have been succeeded by their sons during the last three hundred years,—but two, in fact, namely, Louis XIII., who followed his father, Henry IV., and Louis XIV., who succeeded to Louis XIII., his father. It is two hundred and twenty years since a father was succeeded by a son in France,—a circumstance that Napoleon III. should lay to heart, and not be too sure that the Prince Imperial is to become Napoleon IV. There seems to be something fatal about the French purple, which has a strange tendency to spread itself, and to settle upon shoulders that could not have counted upon experiencing its weight and its warmth. Sometimes it is hung up for the time, and becomes dusty, while republicans take a turn at governing, though seldom with success. There were troubles in the families of Louis XIV., who was too heartless, selfish, and unfeeling not to be that worst kind of king, the domestic tyrant. He tyrannized over even his mistresses.