A HISTORICAL STORY-BOOK.*

" WITHIN the latter half of this century, historical subjects have been rewritten." So says the author of these volumes, and • Stories from the State Papers. By Alex. Charles Ewald. London : Chatto and Windus.

probably most of his readers assent to the truth of his asser- tion. But what strikes us, on the contrary, not only in reading the stories which Mr. Ewald presents to us, and which, no doubt, he has slightly clothed, but in going back to the actual State papers themselves, is that in the light recently thrown upon historical events and characters, so little rewriting should really have become necessary. We have only to consider how very difficult it is to arrive at the truth of incidents affecting our own contemporaries and equals, and we shall see that on the whole we have had a wonderfully true idea of the personages of the past and their doings.. This view, though not suggested by them, is, we think, fully borne out by the narratives given to the public by Mr. Ewald.

We are, however, none the less obliged to those who put within our reach, in readable form, faller particulars of the events re- corded in documents which, to many of us, are either inacces- sible or unintelligible ; and we read with interest what Mr.

Ewald tells us in his preface and introduction as to the archives from which he draws his supplies. Everybody knows vaguely that they are of exceeding value and interest, and that they

have-gone through the roughest vicissitudes of fortune, but it is satisfactory to learn that during the last quarter of a century,

beside much research carried on at Venice and Simancas, the following tasks have been accomplished in England :—

" The State Papers and Correspondence of Henry VIII. have been calendered from 1509 to 1532. The Foreign State Papers of Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, down to the year 1577, have reached the light. The Domestic State Papers, from 1517 to 1610, have been given to the world, in seven-and-twenty volumes. The Papers of the Commonwealth are now before the historical inquirer, in six volumes, while the papers of Charles II. have been indexed to the year 1667. The documents connected with affairs of the Treasury, from 1557 to. 1714, have been published'in four volumes ; and the Papers of the Home Office of the reign of George III. are now being edited in a similar fashion. The Irish State Papers and the State Papers for Scotland have been carefully catalogued, and comprise several volumes. The Calendars of the Colonial Papers relating to America and the West Indies, and to the East Indies and China, are in pro- gress, and now consist of four volumes."

It is, indeed, amazing that until the year 1858 there should have been no safe and proper repository found for public docu- ments "justly reckoned to exceed in age, beauty, correctness, and authority, whatever the choicest archives abroad can boast of the like sort," documents which comprise, among others, the " original treaty, with the very chirograph, between Henry I. and Robert, Earl of Flanders, the privilege of Pope Adrian to Henry II. to conquer Ireland, the treaties with Robert Bruce, and that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, illuminated with the portrait of Francis I., and adorned by the gold seal chased by Benvenuto Cellini himself." Such extraordinary neglect was at last repaired, and we have now, at least, the satisfaction of knowing that the national treasures are safely housed and well cared for.

Mr. Ewald has chosen certain picturesque moments of our history for the subjects of his pictures, adding one only which is not English, though indirectly connected with England, the melancholy life of Juana, the elder sister of Katherine of Arra- gon. He begins by relating the " Youth of Henry V.," and here we must say that we find ourselves immediately and very decidedly at variance with him. Does anybody in the world regard Henry (" Madcap" though he might be) as "a loose,

tavern-haunting, young cad "? We do not believe it, and we deny that the words convey any idea of Shakespeare's Prince. This, in

face of Mr. Ewald, is an audacious assertion, but we hold to it.

What sort of a "young cad" would he be who was capable of the speech, in Act I. of Henry V., beginning,— " I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness " ?

or who could ever have reached to the noble humility of that answer to the King's reproof which commences,—

" Do not think so; you shall not find it so;

And God forgive them that have so much swayed Your Majesty's good thoughts away from me " ?

We are very glad to be assured on such trustworthy authority that at the age of fourteen the " most honoured and redonbted Prince" was so trusted by his father as to be appointed to the command of the troublesome Welsh Border; and also that it was not Prince Henry, but Prince John—afterwards the famous Duke of Bedford—who got into a brawl with the London

citizens, and was brought up before Judge Gascoigne ; but we are not at all surprised at either fact, and we do not see Why Mr. Ewald need be so severe upon "the workings and distortions of a poetical imagination;" or why, because "the bard. has gone so hopelessly astray in his facts," he should be rudely accused of "having the wrong sow by the ear." Shakespeare wrote

more than the First Part of Henry V., and was not such a bungler as to make a total discrepancy between his " Mad Prince " and the victor of Agincourt, even though, as his latest critic remarks, " Que voulez sous? If you have imagination, you must use it." But not to dwell too long on one of these stories, let us pass

to the saddest in the book,—one of the saddest, perhaps, in all history. Truly, as we think, poor Juana—Jeanne In Folle—is described " as a queen who had never known sovereignty,—a daughter who had never known a mother's love or a father's care, a wife who had never known domestic happiness, a mother who found in her first-born her bitterest foe." No woman was ever in more perilous and•forlorn condition than Juana, when the death of her mother, Isabella the Catholic, left her nominal Queen of Castile. Two men stood ready to sacrifice her to their greed and their ambition ; it cannot be doubted that if either father or husband could have gained anything by her death, speedy means would have been found to bring it about. But Juana dead would have left her sovereignty to her son ; Juana mad, who could be so proper a guardian for her and her realm as her husband or her father ? So she was declared mad ; and Ferdinand being noted for wisdom, while Philip was but a poor politician, the younger man soon slipped out of the world and left the field clear for his father-in-law, who thenceforth ruled Castile as he would. The widowed queen was carried to the Castle of Tordesillas, and there for five-and-thirty years was imprisoned as a lunatic. Philip died in 1506 ; in 1520 we know that Juana was perfectly sane, and that her son Charles, who was then her jailer and the occupant of her throne, was aware that she was so ; but no doubt her reason did at last give way, as whose would not, under such wrongs as hers ? For imprisonment, cruel insult, crueller desertion, were not all she had to suffer ; added to all these, were persecutions touching her want of religious faith. In her very girlhood she had been suspected by her mother, Isabella "the Catholic," of heretical tendencies, and had been sharply dealt with. To prove that even a Princess of the Blood was not exempt from the pains and penalties of heresy, the torture called " premia " had been at least once applied to her. In this mild discipline, the victim was hoisted in the air by a rope with heavy weights attached to the feet ; it was common for the limbs to be broken or dislocated, but perhaps Juana might be so far favoured as to be spared the utmost force of the appli- cation. At any rate, about 1676 she seems to have been threatened with a repetition of it ; and, moreover, her keeper writes at that date that he had to order that she was to be put to the rack, to preserve her life. The link be- tween Juana and England is but a very slight one. She might, had her father so willed, have become the Queen of Henry VII. That prudent widower, looking out for a wife with a fortune, was most anxious to obtain her hand, and nobody seems to have thought her supposed insanity any obstacle to the match. "If her infirmity should prove incurable," writes the Spanish Ambassador in England, " it would be no inconvenience, if she were to live here. For it seems to me that they do not much mind her infirmity." We are reminded of the !gravedigger's utterance about Hamlet and his visit to our island : " They are all as mad as he." Ferdinand, however, does not seem to have thought the English quite mad enough to believe his daughter so, should she once come among them ; and the unhappy queen died at Tordesillas, "thanking our Lord that her life was at an end, and recommending her soul to him."

We have said so much of the two first of Mr. Ewald's stories, that very brief space is left us for the rest, and we must not even atop to do more than just mention the charming romance of a Royal love-match, which tells how the first Mary Tudor, the beautiful girl-widow of Louis XII., married her faithful lover, Charles Brandon, and how Wolsey helped the young couple through their difficulties. We must pass over the ter- rible account of the sweating sickness, which in its five visita- tions, ranging between 1485 and 1551, killed more than 30,000 persons, with only one brief extract from Erasmus to show how he, accustomed to Dutch cleanliness, accounted for some, at least, of its ravages :—

" The floors are, in general, laid with white clay, and are covered with rushes, occasionally removed, but so imperfectly, that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, harbouring expectorations, ale-droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned. Whenever the weather changes, a vapour is exhaled which I consider very detrimental to health." The sketches of Elizabeth in her youth, of her unfortunate

favourite Essex, of Guy Fawkes, of the Countess of Essex and Sir Thomas Overbury, and of the massacre of Amboyna, are full of interest, but we have no space to quote from them. The whole book, indeed, is well worth reading, though, as we have said, we do not always agree with Mr. Ewald's decisions, and though, moreover, his English is not always perfect. We had noted several instances of this, but will only, in conclusion, extract one, taken from the story of " The Captive of Castile :"—

" To a young girl," he says, " not wanting in independence of thought or sympathy, the reign of terror she saw around her caused the future heiress of Castile to raise her voice against the miseries occasioned by her mother's rule."

We should like to see this sentence and some others corrected ;

but blemishes as they undoubtedly axe, they are but small drawbacks, when compared with the interest of the whole book, -which we can heartily recommend to all readers who like true romances better than fictitious ones.