History of King Charles the Second of England - Jacob Abbott (readnow .txt) 📗

render him the utmost gratitude. It is but just that your duties are augmented in proportion as the benefits and favors you receive are signal. Take heed of abusing them. Think well that the grandeur, goodness, and justice of God are infinite, and employ all the strength of your mind in adoring his supreme puissance, in loving his inviolable goodness; and fear his rigorous equity, which will make all responsible who are unworthy of his benefits.

Receive, my child, these instructions of my lips; begin and finish every day in your oratory, [Footnote: An oratory is a little closet furnished appropriately for prayer and other exercises of devotion.] with good thoughts and, in your prayers, ask resolution to conduct your life according to the laws of God, and not according to the vanities of this world, which is for all of us but a moment, in which we are suspended over eternity, which we shall pass either in the paradise of God, or in hell with the malign spirits who work evil.

Remember that you are daughter of the Church by baptism, and that this is, indeed, the first and highest rank which you have or ever will have, since it is this which will give you entrance into heaven; your other dignities, coming as they do from the earth, will not go further than the earth; but those which you derive from heaven will ascend again to their source, and carry you with them there. Render thanks to heaven each day, to God who has made you a Christian; estimate this first of benefits as it deserves, and consider all that you owe to the labors and precious blood of Jesus our Savior; it ought to be paid for by our sufferings, and even by our blood, if he requires it. Offer your soul and your life to him who has created you by his puissance, and redeemed you by his goodness and mercy. Pray to him, and pray incessantly to preserve you by the inestimable gift of his grace, and that it may please him that you sooner lose your life than renounce him. You are the descendant of St. Louis. I would recall to you, in this my last adieu, the same instruction that he received from his mother, Queen Blanche, who said to him often 'that she would rather see him die than to live so as to offend God, in whom we move, and who is the end of our being'. It was with such precepts that he commenced his holy career; it was this that rendered him worthy of employing his life and reign for the good of the faith and the exaltation of the Church. Be, after his example, firm and zealous for religion, which you have been taught, for the defense of which he, your royal and holy ancestor, exposed his life, and died faithful to him among the infidels. Never listen to, or suffer to be said in your presence, aught in contradiction to your belief in God and his only Son, your Lord and Redeemer. I entreat the Holy Virgin, whose name you bear, to deign to be the mother of your soul, and in honor of her who is mother of our Lord and Savior, I bid you adieu again and many times.

I now devote you to God forever and ever; it is what I desire for you from the very depth of my heart.

Your very good and affectionate mother, MARIA.

From Amiens, the 10th of June, 1625.

The devout sense of responsibility to Almighty God, and the spirit of submission and obedience to his will, which this letter breathes, descended from the grandmother to the mother, and were even instilled, in some degree, into the heart of the son. They remained, however, latent and dormant through the long years of the monarch's life of frivolity and sin, but they revived and reasserted their dominion when the end came.

The dying scene opened upon the king's vision in a very abrupt and sudden manner. He had been somewhat unwell during a certain day in February, when he was about fifty-four years of age. His illness, however, did not interrupt the ordinary orgies and carousals of his palace. It was Sunday. In the evening a very gay assembly was convened in the apartments, engaged in deep gaming, and other dissolute and vicious pleasures. The king mingled in these scenes, though he complained of being unwell. His head was giddy--his appetite was gone--his walk was unsteady. When the party broke up at midnight, he went into one of the neighboring apartments, and they prepared for him some light and simple food suitable for a sick man, but he could not take it. He retired to his bed, but he passed a restless and uneasy night. He arose, however, the next morning, and attempted to dress himself, but before he finished the work he was suddenly struck by that grim and terrible messenger and coadjutor of death--apoplexy--as by a blow. Stunned by the stroke, he staggered and fell.

The dreadful paroxysm of insensibility and seeming death in a case of apoplexy is supposed to be occasioned by a pressure of blood upon the brain, and the remedy, according to the practice of those days, was to bleed the patient immediately to relieve this pressure, and to blister or cauterize the head, to excite a high external action as a means of subduing the disease within. It was the law of England that such violent remedies could not be resorted to in the case of the sovereign without authority previously obtained from the council. They were guilty of high treason who should presume to do so. This was a case, however, which admitted of no delay. The attendants put their own lives at hazard to serve that of the king. They bled him with a penknife, and heated the iron for the cautery. The alarm was spread throughout the palace, producing universal confusion. The queen was summoned, and came as soon as possible to the scene. She found her husband sitting senseless in a chair, a basin of blood by his side, his countenance death-like and ghastly, while some of the attendants were attempting to force the locked jaws apart, that they might administer a potion, and others were applying a red hot iron to the patient's head, in a desperate endeavor to arouse and bring back again into action the benumbed and stupefied sensibilities. Queen Catharine was so shocked by the horrid spectacle that she sank down in a fit of fainting and convulsions, and was borne immediately away back to her own apartment.

In two hours the patient's suspended faculties began to return. He looked wildly about him, and asked for the queen. They sent for her. She was not able to come. She was, however, so far restored as to be able to send a message and an apology, saying that she was very glad to hear that he was better, and was much concerned that she could not come to see him; she also added, that for whatever she had done in the course of her life to displease him, she now asked his pardon, and hoped he would forgive her. The attendants communicated this message to the king. "Poor lady!" said Charles, "she beg my pardon! I am sure I beg hers, with all my heart."

Apoplexy fulfills the dread behest of its terrible master Death by dealing its blow once with a fatal energy, and then retiring from the field, leaving the stunned and senseless patient to recover in some degree from the first effect of the stroke, but only to sink down and die at last under the permanent and irretrievable injuries which almost invariably follow.

Things took this course in the case of Charles. He revived from the stupor and insensibility of the first attack, and lay afterward for several days upon his bed, wandering in mind, helpless in body, full of restlessness and pain, and yet conscious of his condition. He saw, dimly and obscurely indeed, but yet with awful certainty, that his ties to earth had been suddenly sundered, and that there only remained to him now a brief and troubled interval of mental bewilderment and bodily distress, to last for a few more hours or days, and then he must appear before that dread tribunal where his last account was to be rendered; and the vast work of preparation for the solemn judgment was yet to be made. How was this to be done?

Of course, the great palace of Whitehall, where the royal patient was lying, was all in confusion. Attendants were hurrying to and fro. Councils of physicians were deliberating in solemn assemblies on the case, and ordaining prescriptions with the formality which royal etiquette required. The courtiers were thunderstruck and confounded at the prospect of the total revolution which was about to ensue, and in which all their hopes and prospects might be totally ruined. James, the Duke of York, seeing himself about to be suddenly summoned to the throne, was full of eager interest in the preliminary arrangements to secure his safe and ready accession. He was engaged night and day in selecting officers, signing documents, and stationing guards. Catharine mourned in her own sick chamber the approaching blow, which was to separate her forever from her husband, deprive her of her consequence and her rank, and consign her, for the rest of her days to the pains and sorrows, and the dreadful solitude of heart which pertains to widowhood. The king's other female intimates, too, of whom there were three still remaining in his court and in his palace, were distracted with real grief. They may have loved him sincerely; they certainly gave every indication of true affection for him in this his hour of extremity. They could not appear at his bedside except at sudden and stolen interviews, which were quickly terminated by their being required to withdraw; but they hovered near with anxious inquiries, or else mourned in their apartments with bitter grief. Without the palace the effects were scarcely less decisive. The tidings spread every where throughout the kingdom, arresting universal attention, and awakening an anxiety so widely diffused and so intense as almost to amount to a terror. A Catholic monarch was about to ascend the throne, and no one knew what national calamities were impending.

In the mean time, the dying monarch lay helpless upon his bed, in the alcove of his apartment, distressed and wretched. To look back upon the past filled him with remorse, and the dread futurity, now close at hand, was full of images of terror and dismay. He thought of his wife, and of the now utterly irreparable injuries which he had done her. He thought of his other intimates and their numerous children, and of the condition in which they would be left by his death. If he had been more entirely sensual and selfish in his attachments, he would have suffered less; but he could not dismiss these now wretched participators in his sins from his mind. He could do very little now to promote their future welfare, or to atone for the injury which he had done them; but his anxiety to do so, as well as his utter helplessness in accomplishing his desire, was evinced by his saying, in his last charge to his brother James, just before he died, that he hoped he would be kind to his children, and especially not let poor Nelly starve. [Footnote: Eleanor Gwyn. She was an actress when Charles first became acquainted with her.]

Troubled and distressed with these thoughts, and still more anxious and wretched at the prospect of his own approaching summons before the bar of God, the fallen monarch lay upon his dying bed, earnestly desiring, but