Montaigne, passing judgement on these examples, says: “It would seem” that death could not free Henry VII from his pledge; and that death was not necessary to release Count Egmont from his obligation.
These pages simply mirror the moral reflections that were passing through Montaigne’s mind in the early days of his authorship, before his individual method and meaning had become defined to himself.
The last sentence is a personal one, added, as before, in 1595: “I shall be on my guard, if I can, that my death may say nothing which my life has not previously said.” The Essay originally ended with “the mason in Herodotus,” and was a mere leçon.
DEATH, they say, releases us from all our engagements; I know some who have regarded this differently. Henry the Seventh, King of England, made an agreement with Dom Philip, son of the Emperor Maximilian, — or, to give him a position of higher honour, father of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, — that the said Philip should deliver into his hands his enemy, the Duke of Suffolk, of the White Rose party, who had fled from England and retired to the Low Countries; while, on his side, he promised to make no attempt on the life of the said duke; but when dying, by his testament he expressly ordered his son to put the duke to death as soon as he himself should be dead.[1] Lately,[2] in the tragedy which the Duke of Alva gave us to see at Brussels, of Count Horn and Count Egmont,[3] there were many noteworthy incidents, among others, this: that the said Count Egmont, on the faith of whose guaranty Count Horn had surrendered himself to the Duke of Alva, demanded with great earnestness that he should be put to death first, to the end that his death might release him from his pledge to the said Count Horn. It would seem that death did not discharge the former[4] from his plighted faith, and that the latter[5] was released from his, even without dying. We cannot be held responsible beyond our strength and our resources; for this reason, that results and consequences are in no wise within our power, and that there is, in truth, nothing within our power but our will; upon that are necessarily based and established all the rules
