we then for aught but what our eyes see and our ears hear? What to us then is the date when the play was written? Shall our ears at that moment be vexed with twice-told tales of the source of the plot? Be then and there the drowsy hum of commentators uncared for and unheard.”
To this we attempt no reasoned reply, for it is impossible to believe that the writer takes seriously a view which implies that what to the rest of us is an achievement splendid alike in conception and execution is to its author merely love’s labor lost.
The Contributors’ Club
Prince Rupert’s Mercy
The friendly precincts of the Club afford no fitting field for the splintering of lances. Yet I am tempted to run a course against no less a champion than Goldwin Smith, who in his thoughtful and scholarly essay on The Great Puritan has cast a slur on the honor of Cromwell’s chief antagonist, Prince Rupert. The accusation of barbarity against the valiant Royalist leader is one which has been heedlessly repeated by numberless historians, ever since it was first made in those Puritan pamphlets whose writers had seen the soldiers and standards of the “Cause” go down before Rupert’s invincible charge. In them the injustice was perhaps pardonable. Bred in a land which had grown unused to the harsh exactions and extremities of war, they saw ruthless cruelty in the inevitable demands of the soldiery, and felt the hardships of the time as so many deliberate inflictions. Rupert, their arch terror, Rupert, the king’s sword hand; he who had taught to English armies the secret of the charge with bare steel and who “put that spirit into the king’s army that all men seemed resolved,”—Rupert was naturally held accountable for every burned cottage, every wasted field, and for all those other more dreadful outrages which existed but in the frenzied imaginations of their narrators. Against the young foreign prince who had started up beside the Standard of King Charles like war incarnate were turned those pens which had been sharpened to vituperation in the Christian occupation of religious controversy. So much for those news-writers who sent out their fierce arraignments and warnings, while London citizens piled their earthworks in hourly expectation of Rupert’s onset, and Milton affixed to his house door his proud appeal against the despoilment he dreaded.
Surely it should be the privilege of later writers, whose pulses are unstirred by panic or conflict, to disregard such clamorous and unproven accusations. In this age we may see something of Prince Rupert’s very self, where his contemporaries saw often only the flash of his scarlet cloak, the whirl of dust about his horse’s hoofs. It is with much surprise. therefore, and even more regret, that I find Goldwin Smith, whose wide thought and lucid style have won him a place of such authority, echoing the cry of those far-away pamphleteers. Doubtless in his preoccupation with the character of Cromwell, the author allowed himself a certain carelessness in his passing allusion to Cromwell’s antagonist. Since the Protector, however, has the great voice of success to trumpet his virtues, and since the leader of the popular and progressive cause never lacks champions to acclaim him, it may not be amiss that here and there a voice should, with Whitman’s give
“vivats to those who have failed,”
or should at the least accord them justice.
