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Updated: June 6, 2025
Be a man of sense watch kings and kingcraft go your way home in peace, and let peace be your glorious triumph over war! From John such advice was valuable. Acknowledging the joys and comforts of peace, we shook hands, I wished John well with his fighting, and we parted.
We have already remarked on its absurdity. If the child were not Messiah, he need not have been alarmed; if it were, his efforts were fruitless. But he does not see this, and so plots and works underground in the approved fashion of kingcraft. His reason for questioning the Magi as to the time was, of course, to get an approximate age of the infant, that he might know how widely to fling his net.
The flourishing statement which he gives in his memoirs of King James's reception, may, however, be treated as wholly apocryphal. James the Second, with all his errors, was too shrewd a man, too practised in kingcraft, to speak of the "perfidious family of Athole," or to mention the head of that noble house by the title of that "old traitor."
James could leave some things alone in the comfortable hope that all would by and by come out right, but Charles was not satisfied without meddling everywhere. Both father and son cherished some good intentions; both were sincere believers in their narrow theory of kingcraft. For wrong-headed obstinacy, utter want of tact, and bottomless perfidy, there was little to choose between them.
"But, sire," he said, at the close of one of the King's remarks, "if these are your sentiments, why did you not state them more fully to-day at the Thing, and why should you not even now call a meeting of the Stor Thing, and have the matter properly discussed by all in the land who have a right to speak?" "Hadst thou had any experience of kingcraft, Erling, thou hadst not asked the question.
"Son," said Ferdinand, when they were alone, "early and betimes should the Infants of Spain be lessoned in the science of kingcraft. These nobles are among the brightest jewels of the crown; but still it is in the crown, and for the crown, that their light should sparkle.
More than that, the pathetic humanness of it all, the bitter cynical censure of the King, overborne and cast out by the abiding tenderness of the father, crushed by no logic of kingcraft, was that touch of nature which made him kin even to this stern and pitiless despot in spite of the repulsion wakened by the justice of the King.
According to this opinion, therefore, the southern races were more ignorant, less civilized, more readily duped by priestcraft and kingcraft; above all, readier to bow to despotism, and indifferent to freedom.
He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft and save him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which accomplishment he does not possess: it is not in iron. We think the more precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes. But such an adversary is not to be underrated. I do not underrate him: and certainly not he me.
They looked on themselves not as swordsmen, to be caught up and flung away at the will of a paymaster, but as men who had left farm and merchandise at a direct call from God. A great work had been given them to do, and the call bound them till it was done. Kingcraft, as Charles was hoping, might yet restore tyranny to the throne.
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