The visions of England Lyrics on leading men and events in English history by Francis T. Palgrave |
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THE CAPTIVE CHILD
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 | The visions of England |  |
THE CAPTIVE CHILD
September 8: 1650
Pale white rose of royal race,
Flower of France, and England's flower,
What dost here at twilight hour
Captive bird in castle-hold,
Picture-fair and calm and cold,
Cold and still as marble stone
In gray Carisbrook alone?
—Fold thy limbs and take thy rest,
Nestling of the silent nest!
One wan hand beneath her cheek,
One on the holy texts that tell
Of God's love ineffable;—
Last dear gift her father gave
When, before to-morrow's grave,
By no unmanly grief unmann'd,
To his little orphan band
In that stress of anguish sore
He bade farewell evermore.
Known the pangs in store for thee,
Known the coarse fanatic rage
That,—despite her flower-soft age,
Maidenhood's first blooming fair,—
Fever-struck in the imprison'd air
As rosebud on the dust-hill thrown
Cast a child to die alone,—
He had shed, with his last breath,
Bitterer tears than tears of death!
In her hand the pictured book
Where Christ beneath the scourger bow'd,
Crying ‘O poor man!’ aloud,
And in baby tender pain
Kiss'd the page, and kiss'd again,
While the happy father smiled
On his sweet warm-hearted child;
—So now to him, in Carisbrook lone,
All her tenderness has flown.
She has seen him act his part;
Nothing in his life so well
Gracing him as when he fell;
As the mercy-message Home;
Seen the scaffold and the shame,
The red shower that fell like flame;
Till the whole heart within her died,
Dying in fancy by his side.
Now the low wind may lift her hair,
Motionless in lip and limb;
E'en the fearful mouse may skim
O'er the window-sill, nor stir
From the crumb at sight of her;
Through the lattice unheard float
Summer blackbird's evening note;—
E'en the sullen foe would bless
That pale utter gentleness.
Do not question if she sleep!
She has no abiding here,
She is past the starry sphere;
Kneeling with the children sweet
At the palm-wreathed altar's feet;
—Innocents who died like thee,
Heaven-ward through man's cruelty,
To the love-smiles of their Lord
Borne through pain and fire and sword.
Elizabeth, second daughter of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, was born on Innocents' Day, 1635. The incident recounted in Stanza iv occurred in 1637. She had been taken on a visit to Hampton Court to her mother, who wished her to be present at her own vesper-service, ‘when Elizabeth, not yet two years old, became very restless. To quiet her a book of devotion was shown to her.’ The King, when the Queen drew his attention, said, ‘She begins young!’
This tale is told by Mrs. Green, in her excellent Princesses of England, (London, 1855),—a book deserving to be better known,—on the authority of the Envoy Con.
The first grief of a very happy and promising childhood may have been the loss of her sister Anne in 1640. But by 1642, the evils of the time began to press upon Princess Elizabeth: her mother's departure from England, followed by her own capture by order of the Parliament; her confinement under conditions of varying severity; and the final farewell to her father, Jan. 29, 1649.
From that time her life was overshadowed by the sadness of her father's death, her own isolation, and her increasing feebleness of health. She seems to have been a singularly winning and intelligent girl, and she hence found or inspired affection in several of the guardians successively appointed to take charge of her. But if she had not been thus marked by beauty of nature, our indignant disgust would hardly be less at the brutal treatment inflicted by the Puritan-Independent authorities upon this child:—at the refusal of her prayer to be sent to her elder sister Mary, in Holland; at the captivity in Carisbrook; at the isolation in which she was left to die.—Yet it is not she who most merits pity!
In this poem, written before the plan of the book had been formed, I find that some slight deviation from the best authorities has been made. Elizabeth's young brother Henry, Duke of Gloster, shared her prison: and although her own physician, Mayerne, had been dismissed, yet some medical attendance was supplied.—Henry Vaughan has described the patience of the young sufferer in two lovely lines:
And drank'st thy wormwood with a smile.
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