Born: Heneage Finch,
Earl of Nottingham, 1621; Robert
Barclay, celebrated
Quaker, author of the Apology, 1648; Gordonstown,
Morayshire; Frederick Augustus of Saxony, 1750; Sir
Martin Archer Shee, portrait-painter, 1770, Dublin;
Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 1777.
Died: Childebert I, of
France, 558, Paris; Henri de Lorraine, Duke of Guise,
assassinated at Blois, 1588; William Davison,
secretary of state to Queen Elizabeth, 1608; Michael
Drayton, poet, 1631; James Sargent Storer, engraver,
1854, London.
Feast Day: St. Servulus,
confessor, 590. The Ten Martyrs of Crete, 3rd century.
St. Victoria, virgin and martyr, 250.
THE EIKON BASILIKĖ
On the 23
rd
of December 1648,
Richard Royston, the royal bookseller at the "Angel"
in Ivy Lane, received the MS. copy of the Eikon
Basilik� for the press. Such is the earliest
date we find in connection with a book which became
very famous during the turbulent times of the
Commonwealth. Whether any copies were printed by the
30th of the ensuing month, the day when
Charles I was
executed, is doubtful; but there is no doubt that it
was largely in circulation soon afterwards, and that
it produced a powerful effect on the Royalists. Most
of them believed that the king wrote it; the peculiar
character of the book, and the publishing of it by the
king's bookseller, encouraged this belief; nor were
the active members of the court-party (for reasons
presently to be noticed) at all anxious to disturb
this favourite and favourable impression.
The work itself, which was the
chief means of obtaining for Charles I the designation
of the 'Royal Martyr,' is a remarkable composition, by
whomsoever written. M. Guizot, in his history of the
events of those times, thus characterises it:
'The manuscript had probably
been perused, perhaps even corrected, by Charles
himself, during his residence in the Isle of Wight.
In any case, it was the real expression, and true
portraiture of his position, character, and mind, as
they had been formed by misfortune. It is remarkable
for an elevation of thought which is at once natural
and strained; a constant mingling of blind royal
pride and sincere Christian humility; heart-impulses
struggling against habits of obstinate
self-consciousness; true piety in the midst of
misguided conduct; invincible though somewhat inert
devotion to his faith, his honour, and his rank; and
as all these sentiments are expressed in monotonous
language, which, though often emphatic, is always
grave, tranquil, and even unctuous with serenity and
sadness�it is not surprising that such a work should
have profoundly affected all royalist hearts, and
easily persuaded them that it was the king himself
who addressed them.
There can be no doubt that
Royalists and Parliamentarians were alike attracted
by the Eikon Basilik�, though for different reasons.
Appearing directly after the king's death, and
purporting to be a 'Portraiture of his Sacred
Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings,' it could
not fail to excite a deep interest in the faithful
adherents of the House of Stuart. Even among many of
Charles's opponents his fate had excited strong
sympathy; he was regarded as having been less in
error than some of his advisers; and there was a
general tendency to forget his faults, and remember
his virtues. 'Hence,' says Lord Macaulay ('Milton,'
Encyclopaedia Britannica), 'the appearance of a
work, professedly by his own hand�in which he is
represented in the constant exercise of prayer,
asserting the integrity of his motives before the
Great Searcher of Hearts, and urging a fervent
appeal from the injustice and cruelty of man to the
justice and clemency of God�was eminently calculated
to agitate the public mind in his favour, and to
make every tongue vibrate in execration of his
enemies.'
The Royalists unquestionably relied
greatly on the effect which they expected to be
produced by the book; and nearly fifty thousand
copies of it were sold in England. On the other
hand, the Puritans or Parliamentarians, alarmed at
the effect on the public mind, desired Milton to
write an answer to the Eikon Basilik�, with the
view of shewing that, whether written by the king or
not, its political reasonings were invalid. Milton
accepted the duty; and hence his Eikonoclastes, or
Image Breaker, one of the most celebrated of his
works. The two books should be read together: the
Eikon Basilike/, not as the production of the
unfortunate king, but of the bishop of Exeter, Dr.
Gauden; and the Eikonoclastes (more frequently
spelled Iconoclastes or Iconoclast) of Milton.
There
is reason to believe that Milton suspected the
author of the Eikon to be some bishop or clergyman;
but still he answered it as if it had been a royal
production. Macaulay, less favourable than Guizot to
the Royalists, thus characterises the Iconoclast:
'Pressing closely on his antagonist, and tracing
[tracking?] him step by step, he either exposes the
fallacy of his reasonings, or the falsehood of his
assertions, or the hollowness of his professions, or
the convenient speciousness of his devotions. He
discovers a quickness which never misses an
advantage, and a keenness of remark which carries an
irresistible edge. In argument and in style, the
Iconoclast is equally masterly, being at once
compressed and energetic, perspicuous and elegant.
It is a work, indeed, which cannot be read by any
man, whose reason is not wholly under the dominion
of prejudice, with-out producing a conviction
unfavourable to the royal party; and it justly
merited the honourable distinction conferred upon it
by royalist vengeance, of burning in the same flames
with the Defence of the People of England!
We have mentioned Dr. Gauden,
bishop of Exeter, as the author of the Eikon Basilik�.
This is now known to have been the case, but the
Royalists and High-Church party continued, to an
advanced period, to foster the popular belief that the
First Charles wrote it. The question was long a matter
of literary discussion, and in the last century, we
find Hume, in his History of
England, advocating the
claims of the king to the authorship, in preference to
those of Dr. Gauden. Moreover, it was a species of
pious fraud, which the statesmen and churchmen deemed
politic to encourage 'for the public advantage.' The
late Sir James Mackintosh was of opinion that,
irrespective of other testimony, the Eikon reads more
like the production of a priest than of a king. 'It
has more of dissertation than effusion. It has more
regular division and systematic order than agree with
the habits of Charles. The choice and arrangement of
words shew a degree of care and neatness which are
seldom attained but by a practised writer. The views
of men and affairs, too, are rather those of a
bystander than an actor; they are chiefly reflections,
sometimes in themselves obvious, but often ingeniously
turned, such as the surface of events would suggest to
a spectator not too deeply interested. It betrays none
of those strong feelings which the most vigilant
regard to gravity and dignity could not have uniformly
banished from the composition of an actor and a
sufferer. It has no allusions to facts not accessible
to any moderately-informed man: though the king must
have (sometimes rightly) thought that his superior
knowledge of affairs would enable him to correct
vulgar mistakes.'
Numerous copies of the Eikon Basilik� are preserved in the
public and private
libraries of this country�not only on account of the
curious circumstances connected with the work itself,
but because it was customary to write on the
fly-leaves, during the troubled period of the
Commonwealth, melodies and other verses on the hapless
monarch who had been decapitated. These inscriptions shewed that the grief was
deep and sincere among those
who thought the cry of 'Church and King' was the only
one which could save the nation. Some went to the very
extreme of adulation. One ran thus:
'Nee Carolus Magnus
Nee Carolus Quintus
Sed Carolus Agnus
The jacet intus.'
Mr. E. S. Taylor has described,
in Notes and Queries, a copy of the work, containing
two very curious Chronosticons in manuscript: that is,
enigmas in which certain dates are denoted. Roman
numerals, as most persons are aware, are letters of
the alphabet, and may thus be used in two different
ways. In one of the chronosticons here adverted to,
the praises of Charles I are celebrated, and at the
same time the year 1648, in which, according to the
old method of reckoning the commencement of the year
he was executed, is denoted:
ReX pIVs et
greX VerVs
ConDemnantVr InIq
Ve
The other embodies the year of
the world (according to one system of chronology),
namely, 5684, as that in which the king was executed:
TrlstIa perCharl
Deploro fVnera RegIs
Inferna Ingratae Detestor MVnera
pLebIs
ReX DeCoLLatVr serVIs;
qVIs taLIa Verbls
EXpLICet aVt posslt LaChryMls
aeq Vare Labores
HIC pletatIs honos, sIC RegeM
In sCeptra repon Vnt
These are to be thus
understood. The letters in thick capitals denote the
numerals; M, D, C, L, X, I, are to be interpreted in
the way usual in Roman numerals; V serves both for v
and u as a letter, and for 5 as a numeral. Each symbol
is used separately: thus I X are 1 and 10, not 9; and
I V are 1 and 5, not 4. We rather suspect that, in
Notes and Queries, the (m) in the first chronosticon
should have been printed in large type as a numeral;
and that an additional (1) in the second should also
be in large type, to make up the quantities.
FAMILY OMENS OF DEATH
The popular omens of death are
almost innumerable, yet the appearance of any one of
them is, according to rustic credulity, sufficient to
foreshew the decease of any ordinary person in the
middle or lower classes of society. For common people
must be satisfied with common things. Even
superstition knows how to pay due deference to rank
and genealogy, and cunningly insinuates herself among
the aristocracy, by contributing her mysterious
influence to enhance the honours of rank and birth.
Thus, among the elite, death-omens assume a special
and distinctive shape, and, becoming a sort of
household dependents, are never heard of but when they
appear to 'suit and service' to the respective
families with which they are severally connected. So
that the family, thus supernaturally honoured, while
disdaining all vulgar omens of mortality, beholds the
appearance of its own with dismay, feeling assured
that death will soon visit some one of its members.
Some of these family omens are curious and
interesting. There still exists in Devon a family
named Oxen-ham, with which such an omen is said to be
connected. Prince, in his Worthies of Devon, speaking
of this, says:
'There is a family of considerable
standing of this name at South Tawton, near Oakhampton,
of which is this strange and wonderful thing recorded,
that at the death of any of them, a bird with a white
breast is seen for awhile fluttering about their beds,
and then suddenly to vanish away.'
Mr. James Howell
tells us that, in a lapidary's shop in London, he saw
a large marble slab to be sent into Devonshire, with
an inscription:
"That John Oxenham, Mary his sister,
James his son, and Elizabeth his mother, had each the
appearance of such a bird fluttering about their beds
as they were dying. "
There is a local ballad on
this subject which is too long for insertion, but, as
it is little known, a few extracts from it may be
interesting. It begins thus:
Where lofty hills in
grandeur meet,
And Taw meandering flows,
There is a sylvan, calm retreat,
Where erst a mansion rose.
There dwelt Sir James of
Oxenhain.
A brave and generous lord;
Benighted traveller never came
Unwelcome to his board.
In early life his wife had
died,
A son he ne'er had known,
And Margaret, his age's pride,
Was heir to him alone.'
Margaret became affianced to a
young knight, and their marriage-day was fixed. On the
evening preceding it, her father gave a banquet to his
friends, who, of course, congratulated him on the
approaching happy union. He stood up to thank them,
and in alluding to the young knight, so soon to be his
daughter's husband, he jestingly called him his son:
'But while the dear,
unpractised word
Still lingered on his tongue,
He saw a silvery-breasted bird
Fly o'er the festive throng.
Swift as the lightning's
flashes fleet,
And lose their brilliant light,
Sir James sank back upon his seat,
Pale and entranced with fright.'
He, however, managed to
conceal the cause of his embarrassment, and the next
day the wedding-party assembled in the church, and the
priest had begun the marriage-service:
'When Margaret with terrific
screams
Made all with horror start
Good heavens! her blood in torrents streams,
A dagger's in her heart!'
The deed had been done by a
discarded lover, who, by the aid of disguise, had
stationed himself just behind her. He drew the dagger
from her breast, and, with a frantic laugh, exclaimed:
'Now marry me, proud maid,
he cried;
Thy blood with mine shall wed;
He dashed the dagger in his side,
And at her feet fell dead.
Poor Margaret, too, grows
cold with death,
And round her hovering flies
The phantom-bird for her last breath,
To bear it to the skies.'
The owl is one of the most
usual omens of death among the commonalty; so, of
course, it could not be received as a family omen
among the aristocracy. As an honourable distinction,
therefore, the dispenser of omens has assigned two
owls, of enormous size, to premonish the noble family
of Arundel of Wardour of approaching mortality.
Whenever these two solemn spectres are seen perched on
a battlement of the family mansion, it is too well
known that one of its members will soon be summoned
out of this world.
The ancient baronet's family
of Clifton, of Clifton Hall, in Nottinghamshire, is
forewarned that death is about to visit one of its
members, by a sturgeon forcing itself up the river
Trent, on whose bank their mansion is situated near to
Clifton Grove, the scene of Henry Kirke White's poem
of that title.
There is an ancient Roman
Catholic family in Yorkshire, of the name of
Middleton, which is said to be apprised of the death
of any one of its members by the apparition of a
Benedictine nun. Camden, in his Magna Britannia, after
speaking of the illustrious antiquity of the Brereton
family, says 'this wonderful thing respecting them is
commonly believed, and I have heard it myself affirmed
by many, that for some days before the death of the
heir of the family, the trunk of a tree has always
been seen floating in the lake adjoining their
mansion.' On this omen, Mrs. Hemans has some spirited
stanzas, among which occur the following:
'Yes! I have seen the
ancient oak
On the dark deep water cast,
And it was not felled by the woodman's stroke,
Or the rush of the sweeping blast;
For the axe might never touch that tree,
And the air was still as a summer sea.
'Tis fallen! but think thou
not I weep
For the forest's pride o'erthrown;
An old man's tears lie far too deep,
To be poured for that alone!
But by that sign too well I know
That a youthful head must soon be low!
He must, he must! in that
deep dell,
By that dark water's side,
'Tis known that ne'er a proud tree fell,
But an heir of his father's died.
And he�there 's laughter in his eye,
Joy in his voice�yet he must die!
Say not 'tie vain! I tell
thee, some
Are warned by a meteor's light,
Or a pale bird flitting calls them home,
Or a voice on the winds by night;
And they must go! and he too, he�
Woe for the fall of the glorious Tree!'
In a note to the Lady of the
Lake, Sir Walter Scott gives the following curious
account from the manuscript memoirs of Lady Fanshaw.
Her husband, Sir Richard, and herself, chanced, during
their abode in Ireland, to visit a friend, the head of
a sept, who resided in his ancient baronial castle,
surrounded with a moat. At midnight, Lady Fanshaw was
awakened by a ghostly and supernatural scream; and,
looking out of bed, beheld, by the moonlight, a female
face and part of the form hovering at the window. The
distance from the ground, as well as the circumstance
of the moat, excluded the possibility that what she
beheld was of this world. The face was that of a young
and rather handsome woman, but pale; and the hair,
which was reddish, was loose and dishevelled. The
dress, which Lady Fanshaw's terror did not prevent her
remarking accurately, was that of the ancient Irish.
This apparition continued to
exhibit itself for some time, and then vanished with
two shrieks similar to that which had first excited
Lady Fanshaw's attention. In the morning, with
infinite terror, she communicated to her host what she
had witnessed, and found him prepared not only to
credit, but to account for the apparition.
'A near relation of my
family,' said he, 'expired last night in this
castle. We disguised our certain expectation of the
event from you, lest it should throw a cloud over
the cheerful reception which was your due. Now,
before such an event happens in this family and
castle, the female spectre, whom you have seen,
always is visible. She is believed to be the spirit
of a woman of inferior rank, whom one of my
ancestors degraded himself by marrying, and whom
after-wards, to expiate the dishonour done to his
family, he caused to be drowned in the castle-moat.'
In his Peveril of the Peak,
Sir Walter mentions a similar female spirit or
banshee, said to attend on the Stanley family, warning
them, by uttering a shriek, of some approaching
calamity; and especially, 'weeping and bemoaning
herself before the death of any person of distinction
belonging to the family.'
It is unfortunate that so many
of these ancient family omens have come down
unaccompanied with the particulars that gave rise to
them, which would have rendered them far more
interesting. Now, we can scarcely see any connection
between the omen and the family, or conceive why the
things specified should have been considered omens of
death at all.
