Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/350

 coming to rescue the distressed lady, as Perseus to Andromeda; the avenger of blood at Bosworth field; the Hercules of the twelve labours; who overcame the Nemean lion in Edward IV; the Erymanthian boar in Richard III; the Arcadian stag in John of Lincoln; the Cretan bull in James of Scotland; the mares of Diomedes in Martin Swart; whose hydra had been the civil wars; who had put down the Stymphalian birds by the agency of the Star Chamber; had thwarted in Margaret of York the host of the Amazons; and found the three heads of Geryon in Maximilian, the archduke Philip, and the dowager of Burgundy; who had beaten Cacus in Perkin Warbeck, and Cerberus in three still more insignificant enemies, and by overcoming Max's opposition to the French alliance had lulled the dragon and made his way into the garden of the Hesperides. It is not every Hercules who answers so precisely to the archetype.

And then think of him as the eligible parti of Europe; the young pretender of fifty looking out for a wife; thinking of the queen of Naples as very practicable, and at all events worth very minute inquiries as to teeth and stay-laces; or perhaps Margaret of Austria, who could make him arbiter of the Netherlands, and possibly of Spain; or Johanna of Castile, if she could have been consoled for the death of the archduke; or that delightful duchess of Angoulême, Louise of Savoy, the mother of Francis I, and destroyer of the Constable of Bourbon; or last, but not least, Katharine of Aragon, his own daughter-in-law, if the pope, whose conscience was elastic enough to dispense a marriage with a brother's wife, could so far stretch a point of infallibility as to connive at such a politic enormity. Well, the lady Margaret, poor thing, had four husbands, and Henry VIII had six wives; matrimony was clearly a feature in the germinating policy of the Magians of the renaissance. And then, did ever English king receive, like Henry VII, three caps and swords from three successive popes,—from Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, and Julius II? And last, but not least, Francis Bacon for a biographer! And yet we want something more!