The Sun.
London, England, 1848-03-17 00:00:00

THE SUN,

LITERATURE.

LIVES OF THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND,

Vol XL Bg Agnes Strickland.
As a biographer Miss Strickland has achieved for
herself a very brilliant reputation. A nobler theme
could not by any possibility have been chosen, dur-
ing the lifetime of a Queen Regnant, than that afforded
by the lives, the characters, and the vicissitudes of
her royal predecessors. Our authoress has made an
admirable selection, and very admirably has she ful-
filled even our most sanguine anticipations. There
is a piquancy in the revelations, a vividness in the
portraitures, and a feminine minuteness in the narra-
tives, in the historical work here undertaken b♦ Miss
Strickland, which cannot but exercise a very benefi-
cial fa cination over her contemporaries and her pos-
terity. We say a beneficial fascination, because the
numerous attractions of her style, of her subject, and
of her disclosures must familiarise a large multitude
of readers with matters of which they would other-
wise have remain( d ignorant, and tend to the justifi-
cation of many individuals who would otherwise have
been regarded as heretofore through a disingenuous
and distorting medium. Of all the personages de-
picted in these biographies of the different Queens of
England, the most repulsive to our imagination, in con-
sequence of her odious and most unwomanly characte•
ristics, is assuredly the daughter of James 11., and
wife of William 111., namely, Mary ll.—the subject
of the eleventh volume, now lying before us for con-
sideration. We will acknowledge, of course, that
Mary the Second was subjected to an extraordinary
and almost unparalleled trial, that she was placed in
a glare of light so intense and intolerable, that her
vices as well as her virtues must perforce be divulged to
the whole world in all their beauty or in all their ugli-
ness—in the beauty of their virgin and celestial per-
fections, or in the uglinessof their unnatural and
abhorrent baseness. She was so situated, indeed, that
her affections as a wife were placed in direct antago
nism with her affections as a daughter, that she must
either abandon her husband or neglect her father,
that she must either display a sublime magnanimity
or a cruel and even fiendish ambition. The nature of
Mary 11. was tested in this manner, and it proved
most despicable. She was afforded an opportunity of
handing her name down to all after times as one of
the brightest and purest in our history, and instead of
30 doing, she has rendered herself a very proverb of
meanness and austerity. She—she—the daughter of
the unfortunate and erring, but sincere and consistent
James—she has been christened in the nineteenth
century by the young and eloquent representative of
Canterbury—" England's Gonneril !" " And Eng
land's Gonneril," says he, in one of his most striking
ballads—

smiles to hear
The shouts that triumphed o'er her crownless Lear."
We turned, therefore, we will confess it, with a sort
of loathing or repugnance to the eleventh volume of
Miss Strickland's elegant and remarkable composi-
tion. We would sooner have been required to read a
biography of Robespierre than of Mary 11., for there
was a certain sublimity in the fanaticism of that
bloody despot, whereas in the career of the Queen of
William of Orange there is only visible a harshness
quite incongruous with her sex, and a baseness
wholly unworthy of her position. Miss Strickland
does ample justice to her very abominable subject;
she does not Vrite like a partisan, like a Jacobite, or
like a factious supporter of the Revolution—no, she
writes like a historian, and writing with this historic
impartiality she so narrates the events in the life of
Mary 11., and so develops her disposition to her
readers, as to hold that sovereign up to:their ineffable
reprehension. Here is a single passage which will of
itself evidence the character of Queen Mary 11., and
the spirit in which Miss Strickiand has delineated
that character. It has reference to the flagrant and
unseemly joy with which the child of the ruined
James repaired in state to that palace of Whitehall
from which he had been so recently driven.
" Four writers, who all profess to be eye-witnesses of
her landing or her demeanour in tke palace, have each
recorded what they saw ; one of them, a philosophical
observer, Evelyn ; another an enemy, Lady Churchill ;
a third, a panegyrist, Oldmixon ; and the fourth, an
apologist, her friend, Burnet. This concurrence of evi-
dences, each of whom wrote unknown to the other, makes
the conduct of Mary one of the boat authenticated pas-
sages in history. • She came into 'Whitehall, jolly, as
to a wedding,' wrote Evelyn, • seeming quite transported
with joy.' Some of Mary's party, to shield her from the
disgust that eye witnesses felt at her demeanour, de-
clared that she was acting a part that had been sternly
prescribed hor by her husband's letters. Her partisan,
Oldmixon, enraged at these excuses, exclaimed, •It
they had seen her as others did, they would not have
ventured to report such falsity ; so far from acting a
part not natural to her, there was nothing in her looks
which was not as natural and as lovely as ever there
were charms in woman.'

"Lady Churchill, in her fierce phraseology, speaks of
what she witnessed without the slightest compromise,
and as her assertions are borne cut by a person respect•
able as Evelyn, she may be believed Queen Mary
wanted bowels ; of this she gave unquestionable prow
the first day she came to Whitehall. She ran about it;
looking into every closet and conveniency, and turning
up the quilts of the beds just as people do at an inn, witi,
no sort. of concern in her appearance. Although at the
time I was extremely caressed by her, I thought this
strange and unbecoming conduct. For whatever neces
city there was of deposing li,ng James, he was still her
father, who had been lately driven from that ver)
chamber, and from that very bed ; and if she felt no
tenderness, I thought, rt least, she might have felt
grave, or even pensively sad, at so melancholy a reverst
or fortune. But I kept these thoughts in my own
breast, not even imparting them to my mistress, tilt
Princess Anne, to whom I could say anything.' As th(
conduct of her mistress had been still more coarse and
unnatural than that of her sister, Lady Churchill knew
that she could not blame one without reflecting severely
on the other.

" The following apology, made by her friend, Burnet,
weighs rre,re against Mary than the bold attack of her
sister's favourite. She put on an air, of great gaiety
when she came to Whitehall. I confess I was ono of
those who censured her in my thoughts. I thought a
little more seriousness had done as well when she came
into her father's palace, and was to be set on his throne
the next day. I had never seen the least indecency in
any part of her deportment before, which made this ap-
pear to me so extraordinary, that, afterwards I took the
liberty to a-k her, " How it came that what she saw in
so sad a revolution in her father's person lied not made a
greater impression on her ?" She took this freedom
with her usual goodness, and assured me " That she
felt the sense of it very lively in her thoughts ;" but, she
added, " that the letters which had been writ to her had
obliged her to put on,et cheerfulness in which she might '
perhaps go too far, because she was obeying directions,
and act►ng a-part not natural to her."
" Thus did Queen Mary throw from herself the blame
of an unfeeling levity, which had revolted even the
coarse minds of Burnet and Sarah Churchill ; but
surely the commands of her partner bad reference only
to the manner in which she acted the part cf royalty.
while the eyes of her new subjects were upon her ; it
did not dictate the heartless glee, when she made her
perambulations to examine into the state of the goods
that had fallen into her grasp, on the evening of her
arrival and betimes in the succeeding morning."
In writing this there is certainly no mere vitupera-
tion, Miss Strickland has presented to us the pros
and the cons with a scrupulous exactitude, and from
those different authorities, from the declarations of
Evelyn, of Lady Churchill, of Burnet, and of Old-
mixon, she has drawn her inferences. While, how-
ever, she has condemned these miserable qualities of
the ',Nile of William 111., our authoress has done
ample justice to her masculine and energetic intel-
iect, as betrayed in her behaviour while governing
solos when her husband visited either the Hague or
Ireland. Towards the conclusion of the eleventh
volume is given the commencement of the history of
Anne as a Princess. It is pleasant to revert from
the unwinning callousness of Mary, even though it
be merely to contemplate the unheroic indications of
the nascent energies of Anne. Miss Strickland has
manifestly discovered nothing congenial in the per-
sonal peculiarities of either, but she has woven their
lives with a skilful hand into the tissue of her inte-
resting and remarkable narrative.