Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/235

 common people, that he may supplant the King. This half belief is flung by her upon the face of Humphrey, into the very eyes of his loyalty, and embosses it with the leprosy of her slander.

The English people were scandalized by the interference of Alice Perers with the politics of the reign of Edward III. She was a "fair piece of sin," for whose sake Edward anticipated his dotage. When Parliament interfered to break up a scandal that astonished even the court of France, Alice was perfectly ready to take an oath never again to see the King; for she knew that he valued her counsels because he drivelled over her person. So she returned from exile in time to misrepresent the most honest and outspoken man in Parliament, Peter de la Marr, who was well acquainted with the back-stairs policy which she would fain import into the government of England. As history bids her shift across its light in the various outlines of her domineering temper, to show her to us seated on the bench with the judges, suggesting to them what their ruling must be, or as she drives a trade between the court and foreign envoys, and mistranslates to the King the bias of popular opinion, we perceive a woman whose facile sex is merely a sop to drug a king in order to control his policy. The pages of royal and republican annals are mildewed with these old spots of decayed womanhood. Like dead flowers put to be pressed against some sweet or lofty rhyme, their musty petals mark the place where a single vice enlisted all the fine perception of the sex against honest manhood and the spirit of the age.