The King's weakness was Cromwell's opportunity. He dug his own
grave with false promises, with shilly-shally, with an inimitable talent
for always doing the wrong thing and choosing the wrong road. Open not so
wide those reproachful eyes. Oh, I grant you, he was a noble king, a king
of kings to walk in a royal procession, to sit upon a dais under a velvet
and gold canopy, to receive ambassadors, and patronise foreign painters,
and fulfil all that is splendid and stately in ideal kingship. He was an
adoring husband--confiding to simplicity--a kind father, a fond friend,
though never a firm one."
"Oh, surely, surely you loved him?"
"Not as your father loved him, for I never suffered with him. It was those
who sacrificed the most who loved him best, those who were with him to the
end, long after common sense told them his cause was hopeless; indeed, I
believe my father knew as much at Nottingham, when that luckless standard
was blown down in the tempest. Those who starved for him, and lay out
on barren moors through the cold English nights for him, and wore their
clothes threadbare and their shoes into holes for him, and left wife and
children, and melted their silver and squandered their gold for him--those
are the men who love his memory dearest, and for whose poor sakes we of the
younger generation must make believe to think him a saint and a martyr.
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