Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bitterness; though he professes his intent to range himself and his two sons for the future ‘under the banner of the Commons of England,’ he may be a royalist for any word beside. Even where he mentions the awful curse of his mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by—‘that which hath happened since to that royal family is too sad and disastrous for me to repeat, and yet too visible not to be discerned.’ We can have no doubt that he tells the exact truth. Indeed the whole story fits Charles’s character to the smallest details. The want of any real sense of justice, combined with the false notion of honour; the implacable obstinacy; the contempt for that law by which alone he held his crown; the combination of unkingliness in commanding a private interview and shamelessness in confessing his own meanness—all these are true notes of the man whose deliberate suicide stands written, a warning to all bad rulers till the end of time. But he must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy rogue too. That ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol’s money should make many a sentimentalist reconsider—if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made to reconsider, or even to consider, anything—their notion of him as the incarnation of pious chivalry. At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear. The widow’s curse followed him home. Naseby fight and the Whitehall scaffold were surely God’s judgment of such deeds, whatever man’s may be. FOOTNOTES {87} _North British Review_, No. XLV.—1. ‘Life of Sir Walter Raleigh.’ By P. Fraser Tytler, F.R.S. London, 1853.—2. ‘Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana.’ Edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk (Hakluyt Society), 1848.—3. ‘Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.’ By M. Napier. Cambridge, 1853.—4. ‘Raleigh’s Works, with Lives by Oldys and Birch.’ Oxford, 1829—5. ‘Bishop Goodman’s History of his own Times.’ London, 1839. {95} I especially entreat readers’ attention to two articles in vindication of the morals of Queen Elizabeth, in ‘Fraser’s Magazine’ of 1854; to one in the ‘Westminster’ of 1854, on Mary Stuart; and one in the same of 1852, on England’s Forgotten Worthies, by a pen now happily well known in English literature, Mr. Anthony Froude’s. {138} Since this was written, a similar Amazonian bodyguard has been discovered, I hear, in Pegu. {155} It is to be found in a MS. of 1596.