aunt, how can that be?”
“How indeed?” murmured Henrietta, as she stood with face averted.
“In the first place,” Lady Carewe explained, “the King could hardly mean that any institution of the country should not be spoken of as a historical fact: and, in the next place, the King may have been led into a mistake in issuing such an order.”
“There, Henrietta, what do you say to that?” asked Alice.
“I say,” she replied, “that I think we have nothing to do but to obey the King’s command, whatever it means.”
“And whether he has a right to issue it or not?” Harry inquired.
“Yes, Harry,” she replied, looking up with heightened colour. “Who can possibly have any right to suppose the King wrong, and disobey him for that reason?”
“Who can judge?” Nathanael asked of his aunt. “Does anybody know better than the King what he should order?”
“The wisest and best men in parliament—in the country,” Lady Carewe continued, remembering that the boy did not know the significance of a citizen being in parliament—“the wisest men now living in England consider the King to be misled. They have for years been hoping to bring him to reason by inducing him to call together the great national council—that is, the parliament: and he is so vexed at their steadiness in asking this, that he now forbids that the subject shall be discussed by anybody.”
“But who are the wise men who tease the King?”
“Your father is one of them: and some persons consider him the wisest of them all.”
“But, aunt,” Lucy broke in, “I am sure my papa never teases anybody.”
“That is true, my dear. Your father is a gentleman of an even and sweet temper, and of such noble and gentle manners that not even the Queen, with her foreign prejudices and her foreign papists about her, can frown upon Mr. Hampden. But your father is as steady as he is gentle: he never gives up, and he never will give up the demand that the people of England shall be governed by the law: and, as the King chooses to make his own will the law, there can be no agreement between him and the wise men who think and say what your father thinks and says.”
Who were these wise men? the children desired to know. John Eliot was too young, they supposed; but if his father had been alive, would he have been one?
There could be no doubt about that, as the children would see when they came to understand why their father’s best friend had died in prison—full of virtues as he was, and without any fault. Nathanael and his sisters saw that Edmund’s eyes were full of tears, and they hastened from the subject. They went over the names of all their father’s best-known friends. Was Dr. Giles, the rector at home, one of the wise men? Was Sir Richard Knightley? Was Mr. Pym? Was Mr. Hyde?”
Henrietta advised them to ask whether Sir Thomas Wentworth—(they remembered Sir Thomas Wentworth?)—was he one of the wise men of the nation?
Edmund replied that he had once been so; but that his backsliding was now known to all the kingdom.
“He is a dutiful subject,” exclaimed Henrietta, “and a hero for his bold faithfulness to his sovereign. If ever a man was thorough, it is he.”
“You have taken up his own word, Henrietta,” said Harry. “He will have everything ‘thorough.’”
“Just so,” Henrietta agreed. He was a man whose words and character corresponded.
“But you know, Henrietta,” Lucy sagely observed, “if he does not think as our papa does, he cannot be right.”
Henrietta made no reply to this; and the children went on with their catalogue.
Was Cousin Oliver one of the wise men? Henrietta was smiling: but they were not considering whether Cousin Oliver was as good-looking as papa, or as merry and handsomely dressed as Mr. Pym, or as dignified and gentle as Lord Falkland, and Lord Say, and Lord Brook. He certainly wore very ugly clothes, and when he came up from the decoys, after his fowling, he might be taken for one of his own boatmen: but he was very good, for all that; and he might perhaps be very wise.
Yes, the cousins, Mr. Hampden and Mr. Oliver Cromwell, were of one mind on the state of the kingdom.
“And Uncle Oliver?” asked Henrietta, with a half-smile.
Lady Carewe thought it would have been kinder not to bring forward the name of Uncle Oliver. Sir Oliver Cromwell was old; he had made some mistakes in life which had compelled him to leave Hinchinbrooke, and retire into the Fens. It was more respectful to an old and unfortunate gentleman to pass him by in silence than to make inquiry about his wisdom.
“O aunt!” Henrietta exclaimed, “you mistake me utterly. I honour Uncle Oliver more, I believe, than all of you together. He has made no mistake in the main point. He is devoted to his sovereign; and, in my eyes, that virtue atones for mistakes which more thrifty men never make.”
“I am sure that is enough about Uncle Oliver, considering that we never saw him,” Lucy declared. “Why cannot the King and Queen, and so many wise men, settle matters so that there may not be all this quarrelling? I am sure, Henrietta, that you and Harry have been quarrelling again. Ah! you may pretend what you like—and so may Harry; but we know very well when you have been disputing. Kitty will tell you so. Harry’s face is red, and you look—”
“Lucy, I think you are talking very unkindly,” said Lady Carewe, who had been listening in another direction till her son’s name caught her ear. Lucy was duly abashed.
“I will tell you,” said Henrietta, panting with emotion of some sort, “why the King and these wonderfully wise men cannot settle their quarrel. It is because the wise men will not. They cry out for a parliament—”
“There now, Henrietta! you are speaking of a parliament!”
“I am speaking on behalf of the King,” Henrietta said, with dignity, as if this gave her a right to a topic which all others must avoid. “Those who cry out for a parliament choose to forget that when there was one, it refused the King the money he wanted; and that, if there were to be another, it would be obstinate in its own way, and disoblige and check its sovereign in every possible case.”
“That would be very rude and very wicked,” Nathanael sagely declared. This much support animated Henrietta.
“All this talk about the ship-money, and about the soap, and the beer and wine, and the saltpetre and sedan-chairs, and all the rest of the monopolies, is disgusting,” she declared, “when we all know that the King must have money, like any other gentleman, and more of it—”
“Yes, certainly,” said Nathanael, nodding assent.
“And that if the nation will not give him the means of living, he must take them as he can. There is as much stir about the salt, as if the King was doing something wicked on purpose—”
“So he is,” said Edmund. “You should have heard what the fishermen below were saying about that this morning. When the salt becomes as bad as the soap is now, there will be an end of their trade.”
“Then they should ask themselves how the King can call a parliament which would only contradict and vex him. For my part, I think he is only consulting his own dignity, and what is due to the Queen and her family, in making himself independent of his undutiful people, and showing them how he can do without them.”
“That is a point which remains to be proved,” Edmund Eliot observed. Harry was no longer present, to hear or to reply. When Henrietta began to speak her mind, he had pushed his hat from his brow, and slowly walked away from the party.
“I know I am saying what no one else here will believe,” Henrietta declared, with a slight trembling in her voice. Nathanael came round to her and held her hand; and she kissed his forehead, addressing her remaining words