THE BACHELOR KINGS OF ENGLAND.*

IT would appear that the object which Miss Strickland has proposed to herself as the goal of her ambition is the attainment, in the domain of history, of that position which is occupied by the celebrated Mrs. Ellis in the sphere of didactic morality. Just as the latter writer has persistently employed herself in hunting the women of England through every social relation in which it is possible for them to be placed, and in laying down an elaborate code of laws for their guid- ance in each ; so has the former lady devoted herself to the task of manipulating the two ideas of royalty and womanhood, and of coupling them together for every form of combination and permuta- tion of which they are susceptible. Practice makes perfect in this as in every other pursuit. A combination so simple and obvious as that involved in writing the lives of the Queens of England might have occurred to the merest tyro in the profession; but it must have required a long apprenticeship, and no small share of that readiness of handling which can only be acquired by great experience, to bit on so inoenious a method of approximating the two ideas as that which has suggested the composition of the lives of the bachelor kings. It might, indeed, have been expected that these monarchs would, of all others, have been safe from Miss Strickland's atten- tions ; since, by the very nature of their case, one of the two elements whose conjunction constitutes the sole claim to her notice is neces- sarily absent. She, however, thought otherwise. She is conscious

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that in her " Lives of the Queens of England" she has produced a great historical work, the sole bar to whose perfection lies in those " chasms in the cluOnological chain of royal and domestic national history" which are occasioned by the unavoidable absence of those kings who had been so remiss as to neglect to provide themselves with wives. These chasms the present volume is designed to fill up ; and Miss Strickland's magnum opus is, we trust, at last. com- plete. Since, however, the book professes to have "distinct and independent claims to the attention of our readers," apart from its connexion with the former work, it is only right to submit those claims to a separate and somewhat detailed examination. The first idea which is suggested to us by the title of the work be- fore us is that, unless that title is to be a mere misnomer, the biogra- phies to which it is prefixed ought to be written from a somewhat special and peculiar point of view. The singleness (so to speak) of their subjects should be put prominently forward, and their royalty should be kept comparatively in the background. These monarchs ought, in fact, to be regarded as bachelors rather than as kings ; and the narration of the public events of their reigns ought to be subordi- nated to the examination of the causes which condemned them to the misfortune of leading single lives. For that this is a misfortune Miss Strickland has no sort of doubt. The common phrase "single blessedness" represents to her mind a simply impossible combination of ideas. She quotes the saying of the gallant Francis I., that "a court without ladies is like a sprmg without flowers;" but adds, with quaint discretion and undeniable truth, that "a court full of ladies, without a queen, would soon fall into disrepute with the nation at large"—a lamentable contingency which, if we remember right, not even the presence of a queen has always been sufficient to avert. We repeat, however, that. unless the monarchs whose lives are nar- rated in the present volume are regarded as bachelors rather than as kings, the title of the work has no necessary connexion with its con- tents, and its authoress must stand convicted of a fault analogous to, if not identical with, the logical blunder of introducing into a defini- tion an accidental property. We are sorry to say that, when we proceed to try Miss Strickland's biographies by this simple rule, the result which we obtain is far from being entirely satisfactory. Her failure can scarcely be attributed to the difficulty or laboriousness of the task, for the bachelor kings of England are only three in number, the unhappy individuals being William Rufus, Edward V., and Edward VI. As regards the first of these unfortunates, a most careful examination of his life, as recorded by Miss Strickland, has left us in a state of complete bewilderment as to the causes which prevented his escape from his wretched condition. At first we thought that it might possibly be found in the physical peculiarity from which his nickname was derived ; but we are compelled to acknowledge that this view, attractive as it is from its very simplicity, is entirely without foundation. Although Rufus's hair was, as Miss Strickland delicately puts it, of "a warm colour," he was, in his youth at least, by no means a bad-looking man. He had a commanding look, spark- ling eyes " of two different colours," a " long, finely-moulded throat," and a "very handsome leg." His personal appearance, therefore, will not furnish us with the key to this mystery. Miss Strickland attributes his remaining single to his unwillingness to "submit to the restraints of wedlock, and the decorum and stately ceremonials which the introduction of a queen would necessarily impose on his court ;" and she attributes the roughness of his manners and the violence of his conduct to " the coarse humour, or, as phrenologists would aptly enough term it, the mirthful destructiveness of his character, un- softened by the refined delicacy of female society, and the gentle influence of a virtuous consort.' If, however, he "had not been so suddenly cut off," he might, she thinks, " have followed the example of his brother Robert, who, though several years older, and of equally irregular habits, had forsaken his evil ways and married one of the most beautiful and charming princesses of the age." It was not till many years after his death that he was destined to enjoy the advan- tages of virtuous female society, when Fox, Bishop of Winchester, enclosed his remains in a marble chest together with those of King Lives of the Bachelor Sings of England. By Agnes Strickland, Author of "Lissa of the Queens of England," dm. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.

Canute and Queen Emma; a proceeding which Miss Strickland cha- racterizes as "a singular violation of royal etiquette, if not of pro- priety to intrude the bones of our profligate bachelor king into the last resting-place of so respectable a couple." Speaking of the posi- tion of this chest, which, as every visitor to Winchester knows, is placed, with several others, on a low wall in the choir of that cathedral, Miss Strickland eloquently and suggestively observes that it is " sus- pended as it were between earth and heaven, a moral and a marvel to all beholders."

For nearly four hundred years after the death of William II. all the kings of England were married, a result which Miss Strickland gravely states to have been owing to the fearful example of the evils of celibacy afforded by that wretched monarch. "Tim disreputable life," she says, " and unlamented death of the reckless Norman, whose unrefined nature had disposed him to scorn holy matrimony, warned the next fourteen sovereigns who successively occupied the throne, of the expediency of providing themselves with queens as indispensable to the happiness and respectability of their courts." There is something irresistibly comic in this view, which is quite American in its delicacy, of the motives and objects of a royal mar- riage. When we come to Edward V., and remember that that prince died at the early age of thirteen, we might be tempted to Conclude that there is no special reason for troubling our- selves to inquire why he was never married. Such an idea, however, would be a great mistake. The respectability of the court -must be considered; and, besides, Edward was quite old enough to have been married two or three times over. His younger 'brother, the Duke of York, was married at the mature age of two years, the bride being about a year older ; and Miss Strickland, who subsequently speaks of the duke as "the little widower," fully admits the validity of the ceremony. Edward himself only remained single because of the scarcity of European princesses of a rank equal to his own ; and he was betrothed before his death to Anne, Duchess of Bretagne. Edward VI., who was nearly sixteen when he died, showed a most laudable desire to escape from the evils of celibacy, the object of his attachment being no other than Mary Stuart. That he was not without sound counsellors in this matter may be inferred from the fact that Latimer, -on the first occasion of his preaching before the king, made matrimony the subject of his discourse, dwell- ing on " the evil inclinations and weakness of women, and the diffi- culty husbands found in ruling one wife rightly," and adding the rather unnecessary advice, " not to marry more than one at a time."

We may remark, en passant, that we were scarcely prepared for the severe judgment passed by our authoress on Henry VIII., whose

sense of the evils of a single life, judging from the frequency and vigour of his attempts to escape from them, must have been scarcely less lively than Miss Strickland's own.

The foregoing remarks will have -enabled the readers to perceive that, after all, the only reason which Miss Strickland has given for the celibacy of her three bachelor kings is, that they, one and all, died before they were married; a conclusion which we cannot but think it is just possible we might have arrived without her aid. The fact is that she has committed the error to which we have already re- ferred; and, dropping out out of sight the only circumstance which could justify her in linking together the sovereigns whose lives she has undertaken to relate, has contented herself with giving a narra- tive of the principal events in the personal history of each. Of this narration we can only say that,'after a careful perusal, we are quite unable to suggest any valid reason why it should ever have been published, or even written. Miss Strickland has nothing new to tell us, for she does not appear to have consulted any authorities that have not already been squeezed dry over and over again; nor does she possess even the slightest trace of the faculty of rendering an old story acceptable by presenting it in a new and attractive form. Besides her full share of the faults which are common to lady- historians as a class, she has one or two more which are more pecu- liarly her own. Foremost among these we are inclined to place an absolute inability to appreciate the comparative importance of

different historical facts. She will give a minute account of a pageant, describing the royal robes in the utmost detail ; and she sets herself-seriously to inquire into the apparent anomaly involved in the circumstance that the name of the Bloody Tower is still given to a gateway in the Tower of London, " although it is not a tower in form"—taking care to give '113, in a note, the interesting information that she has " often discussed these curious points with Sir Harris Nicolas." Of her manner of dealing with evidence some idea may be formed from the fact that she states positively that Edward V. and his brother were confined in Ely House during Richard III.'s state visit to the Tower : the only ground for the assertion being that everybody says that the two princes were together for some time at Ely House ; that the Bishop of Ely was in prison at that time, so that his house -was at liberty just then; and that the building was '" singularly well-adapted as a place of detention for the hapless boys." Occasionally Miss Strickland adorns her narrative with moral reflections, or enlivens it with feeble flashes of feminine jocosity. Of the latter, a single specimen, which seems to be specially designed for the delectation of readers of her own sex, will be quite sufficient. 'Speaking of Sir Thomas Vaughan, a rough soldier, who was ap- pointed chamberlain to the infant son of Edward IV., our •historian remarks, a propos of a certain occasion on which a faithful adherent of the king's was admitted to kiss the hand of the baby prince, " Of course the heroic maschman who rformed the duties of his

nursery-maid was responsible for the correct behaviour of the teen first-class houses to provide her dower, and who, arrested when

Prince of Wales on this important occasion." Miss Strickland's • The Sliding Seale Qf gje. By James M`Levy, of the Edinburgh Police Detective Style, which is -by no -means remarkable either for clearness ar staff.

plicity, aims now and then at being impressive, with, it must be con- fessed, a somewhat dubious result. Take, for instance, the following

statement of the fact that Edward V. and his brother were smothered

in bed : " The murder was done in a manner peculiarly horrible to human nature. The children were asleep at midnight in profound

darkness, when Miles Forest and the burly Dighton crept on the bed, and, as if they had been two tangible nightmares, each bodily oppressed the child he had selected to murder. It is probable," she adds, "that the horse-tamer, strong Dighton, took the young king." But afar more serious fault than any turgidity or obscurity of style is to be found in the frequent occurrence of absolute blunders, both in grammatical construction and in verbal meaning, which, as they can scarcely be attributed to ignorance, must be regarded as proofs of a carelessness so inveterate as to be quite beyond excuse. Here are a few of them, selected at random from various parts of the book : "The attempts to introducethe elaborate music of the South into the service of the Church . . . was by no means relished." "Several of the old nobility . . . tauntingly demanded who was the queen's army to fight ?' " "Every one •whom he thought loved their lives and their lands better than Edward V. were brought to his own coronation procession." "The portcullis gateway may be considered as portico and part of the real prison, where the sanguine deeds were done." It is, perhaps, hardly fair to expect a knowledge of Latin even from so learned a lady as Miss Strickland; but she should surely refrain from meddling with it at all, unless she possesses at least a sufficient acquaintance with it to enable her -to quote it cor- rectly. Our authoress, however, appears to be of a different opinion, for she uses it freely, and accumulates blunder on blunder with the greatest complacency. Speak; of the practice of punishing royal children by deputy, she comments on the folly of regarding any boy as "of such high degree that lie is to be considered by his school- masters as noli me tanyere." She refers to Anselm as meeting Rufus's determination to make him Archbishop of Canterbury, with "re- sistance and earnest cries of Noli Episeopali." And, finally, when describing the ceremony of sprinkling the king with ashes on Ash Wednesday, she puts the following astounding formula into the mouth of Bishop Ridley,• "Memento homo quirt ci'iis est, et in einintm reverteris-5 Remember, man, that of ashes thou art come, and to ashes shalt thou return." We had almost forgotten to call attention to what must, after all, be regarded as the most thoroughly objectionable passage in the whole volume. We should much like to know what conceivable class of readers Miss Strickland hoped to gratify by expressing her conviction that Shak- speare's historical plays are not always to be relied upon for the strict accuracy of their facts, in the following words: " Willy Shalt- speare is a mere Will of the Wisp in regard to history." What would she think of -ns if we were to adopt her style, and inform the public that "Aggy Strickland's last work is a mere aggregation of feeble platitudes ?" In offensive flippancy the two observations would be about on a par ; but the latter would have a decided ad- vantage in two not unimportant points—it would be substantially true, and it would be far from being in such flagrant discordance with the dignity of its object.

'Our remarks on Miss Strickland's work will, we hope, have enabled the.reader to form some idea of the -real value of the book, without undergoing the scarcely remunerative labour of reading it for him- self. In common justice, however, we are bound to confess that it has given us a new sensation in connexion with a fact which we have till now regarded with supreme indifference,—it has made us feel distinctly and sincerely thankful that the unmarried kings of land have been so few in number. For more reasons than Miss Strickland suspects, we heartily echo her hope that she " may never be required to write the Biography of a Bachelor King of Great Britain."