Prince Rupert
The Speaker, May 26, 1900

Rupert, Prince Palatine. By Eva Scott. Westminster: Constable; New York: Putnam's Sons





To most minds Prince Rupert is but a momentary apparition in English history: with drums beating and feathers flying he is seen storming across the cleared spaces of the Civil War, dashing everything in pieces till he strikes one stronger than himself and is dashed to pieces in his turn. To those who dream of this romantic tornado, the "furious German" of Macaulay, it will be a great shock even to open Miss Scott's excellent biography and catch sight of the fine portrait at the beginning. None could look less furious: no one certainly could look less German. It is the face of a graceful and pensive man, clever with something more than the hereditary cleverness which was one of the worst of the calamities of the Stuarts, but its most dominant feature is its unfathomable melancholy. Indeed it is a curious and not, I fancy, an accidental fact, that this austerity of visage is almost a monopoly of the portraits of Cavaliers- the roystering gallants of the popular imagination. If they roystered as a rule with that expression of countenance they must have been the most depressing company it is possible to conceive. The Puritan portraits that have come down to us have mostly a satisfied and even a complacent look. Cromwell's face is a healthy and homely one, not without hints of a good dinner; Bunyan's is of the same genial type. Milton's face is touched with severity: possibly because Milton was half a Cavalier. I have said, and I think the point has some bearing on Rupert's character, that this was not a wholly accidental distinction. It is one of the most persistent errors to suppose that Puritanism was subjectively a sombre thing. The enthusiasm for that theology vetoed and sacrificed many harmless pleasures: so does the enthusiasm for gambling or fashionable dress. But in itself, like all enthusiasms, it was a happiness, and any one acquainted with its descendant, modern evangelicalism, knows that its most really troublesome feature is a quite obtrusive hilarity. On the other hand, a certain section of the Cavaliers, of whom Rupert was a picturesque representative, did typify much of the most ancient sadness of the world. There is nothing more consciously dreary than the deliberate pursuit of pleasure. Scattered everywhere through those beautiful lyrics which were the literature of the Cavaliers is that pessimism which seems the inevitable accompaniment of the "carpe diem" philosophy, rising to its grandest outburst in that extraordinary poem in which a Cavalier, a Christian, a priest of the Church of England tore the veil from his own vital paganism:-

"And as a vapour or a drop of rain,
Once lost can ne'er be found again,
So when you or I are made
A fable, song or passing shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night;
So while time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come- let's go a Maying."

   This would be utterly untrue, of course, of that group of idealistic and scholarly Cavaliers, such as Falkland and Lovelace, who were far more religious than the Puritans; but Rupert was not one of these. He was a man whose interests were not merely of this world, but of the fleeting and insecure things of this world- victory, intrigue, popularity. He was far from being ignoble; like every other human being who had to do with Charles I., he suffered for that honour; but he suffered in silence and with a certain chivalry. Even in his old age, Miss Scott tells us, when he was reputed almost a cynic, his real generosity in private was a bright spot in the mean epicureanism of the Restoration. But, though Rupert was a gentleman to the tips of his fingers, he was the very reverse of a Quixote; his wars, treaties, chemical experiments alike give us the impression of one who is filling up a hollow thing- life. It may be that under a hundred badges and disguises there have never been but two parties in the world: those to whom life was a black figure on a white ground, and those to whom it was a white figure on a black ground; those to whom the background of the cosmos is so irradiated with some great hope and opportunity that the direst toils and macerations seem natural; and those to whom the background is black with so unfathomable a blackness that every pleasure must be hoarded like the flowers of Herrick.

Because Rupert, hot from the thrilling but worldly wars and politics of the Continent in the seventeenth century, in some degree typified this last spirit of the Renaissance, its lust of action and diversion, its sense of the swiftness of the passing hour, its love of the stirring gaieties of war- because of this spirit he carried everything before him triumphantly until that spirit met its only real rival. And in that twilight hour of evening, when an audacious fire opened unexpectedly upon his lines, and new men with new war-colours came roaring over the ditch of Marston Moor, Rupert, in a flash of spiritual insight, might have had a vision of the immaterial banner that was borne before them. It was the black sign on the white ground.

Some temptation to stray into speculations like these may be pleaded from the very nature of Miss Scott's most interesting biography, in which the only fault we can discover is that she does not pay sufficient attention to these larger forces which lay at the back of her hero's career. It may seem a singular objection to raise against a life of Prince Rupert that there is too much about Prince Rupert in it, yet this vice of relevancy has ruined more biographies than can be counted. The chief of its evil effects is this, that by failing to value the spirit and power of his opponents the biographer must necessarily do an injustice to the hero himself. We have read biographies of Lord Beaconsfield in which not a word occurred to indicate that Mr. Gladstone was a man of more than ordinary powers: surely it was Beaconsfield who was the sufferer by such a version. This vulgar love of giving the hero an easy victory belongs to that same spirit which dictates certain war pictures in which all the Boers are placing themselves back foremost with a kind of reluctant precision upon the spears of elegant British Lancers. Why any patriotic heart should be stirred by the reflection that a horseman with a ten-foot pole can transfix manifestly terrified agricultural old gentlemen may be a mystery, but the same crude idea of glory is at the bottom of all enthusiastic biographies in which the imagination of the writer has not risen to a fair appreciation of the other side. Miss Scott does not, indeed, fall into any vulgar vituperations of the Puritans, but we think that her figure of Rupert, a singular graphic and spirited one, would have lost nothing if more of the background had been filled in.