The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 300 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 300 pages of information about The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863.

The first of the English Stuarts, James I., is suspected of having allowed his jealousy of his eldest son, the renowned Prince Henry, to carry him to the extent of child-murder.  The Stuarts are called the Fated Line, and it is certain that none of their number, from Robert II.—­who got the Scottish throne in virtue of his veins containing a portion of the blood of the Bruce, and so regalized the family, which, like the Bruces, was of Norman origin, and originally Fitzalan by name—­to Charles Edward, and the Cardinal York, who died but yesterday, as it were, but had a wonderful run of bad luck.  They had capital cards, but they knew not how to play them.  With them, to play was to lose, and the most fortunate of their number were those kings who played as little as they could, such as James I. and Charles II.  Those who lost the most were those who played the hardest, as Charles I. and his second son, James II.  Yet the family was a clever one, with strong traits, both of character and talent, that ought to have made it the most successful of ruling races, and would have made it so, if its chiefs could have learned to march with the times.  They had to contend, in Scotland, with one of the fiercest and most unprincipled aristocracies that ever tried the patience and traversed the purposes of monarchs who really aimed at the good government of their people; and the idiosyncrasy contracted during more than two centuries of Scottish rule clung to the family after it went to England, and found itself living under altogether a different state of things.  What was virtue in Scotland became vice in England; and the ultra-monarchists, who came into existence not long after James I. succeeded to Elizabeth, helped to spoil the Stuarts.  Both James and his successor were dominated by Scotch traditions, and supposed that they were contending with men who had the same end in view that had been regarded by the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the Ruthvens, the Lindsays, and others of the old Scotch baronage.  What helped to deceive them was this,—­that their opponents in England, like the opponents of their ancestors in Scotland, were aristocrats; and they supposed, that, as aristocratical movements in their Northern kingdom had always been subversive of order and peace, the same kind of movements would produce similar results in their Southern kingdom.  They could not understand that one aristocracy may differ much from another, and that, while in Scotland the interest of the people, or rather of the whole nation, required the exaltation of the kingly power, in England it was that exaltation which was most to be feared.  Sufficient allowance has not been made for the Stuarts in this respect, little regard being paid to the effect of the family’s long training at home, which had rendered hostility to the nobility second nature to it.  Had the Stuarts been the supporters of liberal ideas in England, their conduct would have given the lie to every known principle of human action.  As their distrust

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The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 64, February, 1863 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.