Henry Irving could not at first keep away from melancholy pieces.  Henrietta Maria was another sad part for me—­but I used to play it well, except when I cried too much in the last act.  The play had been one of the Bateman productions, and I had seen Miss Isabel Bateman as Henrietta Maria and liked her, although I could not find it possible to follow her example and play the part with a French accent!  I constantly catch myself saying of Henry Irving, “That is by far the best thing that he ever did.”  I could say it of some things in “Charles I.”—­of the way he gave up his sword to Cromwell, of the way he came into the room in the last act and shut the door behind him.  It was not a man coming on to a stage to meet some one.  It was a king going to the scaffold, quietly, unobtrusively, and courageously.  However often I played that scene with him, I knew that when he first came on he was not aware of my presence nor of any earthly presence:  he seemed to be already in heaven.

Much has been said of his “make-up” as Charles I. Edwin Long painted him a triptych of Vandyck heads, which he always had in his dressing-room, and which is now in my possession.  He used to come on to the stage looking precisely like the Vandyck portraits, but not because he had been busy building up his face with wig-paste and similar atrocities.  His make-up in this, as in other parts, was the process of assisting subtly and surely the expression from within.  It was elastic, and never hampered him.  It changed with the expression.  As Charles, he was assisted by Nature, who had given him the most beautiful Stuart hands, but his clothes most actors would have consigned to the dust-bin!  Before we had done with Charles I.—­we played it together for the last time in 1902—­these clothes were really threadbare.  Yet he looked in them every inch a king.

His care of detail may be judged from the fact that in the last act his wig was not only grayer, but had far less hair in it.  I should hardly think it necessary to mention this if I had not noticed how many actors seem to think that age may be procured by the simple expedient of dipping their heads, covered with mats of flourishing hair, into a flour-barrel!

Unlike most stage kings, he never seemed to be assuming dignity.  He was very, very simple.

Wills has been much blamed for making Cromwell out to be such a wretch—­a mean blackguard, not even a great bad man.  But in plays the villain must not compete for sympathy with the hero, or both fall to the ground!  I think that Wills showed himself a true poet in his play, and in the last act a great playwright.  He gave us both wonderful opportunities, yet very few words were spoken.

Some people thought me best in the camp scene in the third act, where I had even fewer lines to speak.  I was proud of it myself when I found that it had inspired Oscar Wilde to write me this lovely sonnet: