by Emily Hahn
From that time on Mark Antony behaved like her legal consort. They were actually married according to Egyptian law; he was given the title of Autocrator, and spoke in his letters of his wife Cleopatra. Many of his eastern domains were turned over to the Queen by treaty, in exchange for her future help in his campaigns. Whatever her true thoughts may have been, Cleopatra at this time pretended to trust her husband absolutely.
The first step in Antony’s program of triumph as they planned it was to be the conquest of Parthia. With an enormous army he set out, full of confidence, Cleopatra accompanying him a part of the way. But she was again pregnant, and when this was discovered she turned back to Alexandria. Confident in the outcome of the war, she passed the time there quietly, and at length gave birth to her fourth and last child, a boy who was, like most Egyptian princes, named Ptolemy.
In the meantime, in spite of his splendid equipment, Antony’s campaign had come to grief. He managed by tremendous effort to bring the remnants of his army into Syria, being like many other men at his best in adversity, but by the time Cleopatra was able to sail in and rescue him, her husband, who had been waiting miserably in a Syrian seaport, had taken refuge in drink. The blow to his masculine pride had been a severe one. He probably dreaded meeting Cleopatra, and the meeting was every bit as painful as he had expected. The Queen naturally decided he had muddled matters and did not conceal her contempt.
Shall we trace in detail the story of Antony’s progressive degradation after this? It is hardly necessary; this is not a military report. In any case, after the Parthian debacle he had great success for a while, and his stock rose another time when Octavian was making overtures of peace and Antony’s discarded wife Octavia almost persuaded him to rejoin her. Cleopatra had to work hard; it took a lot of histrionic ability to hold Antony then to the treaty he had made with her in Antioch. We can hardly suppose that this humiliating affair increased the Queen’s love for him, but she was not playing the game for love. After this final capitulation to past promises—though Mark Antony could not possibly have stood by all the contradictory promises he made in his life—he seems to have settled down and devoted himself wholeheartedly to his Egyptian wife. In my opinion, this was not so much a tribute to Cleopatra’s attractions as a sign that he was losing his grip. He continued to drink too much. He floundered, and as he grew weaker in will he grasped at her, clinging like a drowning man to his wife’s strength.
Cleopatra was more than ever eager to defeat Octavian and install Caesarion in Caesar’s place. That ambition was one of the few bonds which still remained between herself and Antony. As soon as the triumvirate treaty expired, the Egyptian army and navy set forth, with Antony and Cleopatra in close attendance. Antony urged his wife repeatedly not to stay with the forces, to go back to Egypt, but she did not dare leave him to his own devices. She was in the quandary which many another drunkard’s wife can well understand: was the man who had failed in the Parthian campaign capable of doing this job without her? Probably not. And even if he had been, could she trust him to remember her interests in the hour of victory? He had let her down that way, too, more than once in the past. Decidedly, Cleopatra would not go back to Alexandria. She was still aboard her flagship when the great engagement began.
The decisive battle, a naval one, took place near Actium on the Ambracian Gulf. Antony had deliberately elected to meet his foe in full force on the water, for he was strongly supplied with Egyptian ships, whereas the Roman land army might well be superior to his own land forces. As it turned out, Egyptian superiority on the water was too great; it constituted an embarrassment. Antony’s ships were huge armored things, comparatively impregnable but very slow-moving. Octavian’s vessels were small and agile, too light for ramming the big ships. Instead they set upon the enemy in clusters, like dogs attacking a stag.
The day wore on, and still the strange clumsy battle continued. By slow degrees it became evident that Antony was losing. Then suddenly something took place which no one expected. Cleopatra the valiant, Cleopatra the long-suffering, the Queen who had taken back a faithless lover after four years of ill treatment—Cleopatra deserted Antony. She gave her orders, called together her ships, and set sail in a favoring wind for Egypt. It was not at all the traditional thing to do, and must have shocked the onlookers, but Antony’s behavior after that was even less orthodox.
When he saw what was going on he leaped into his galley and pursued her, leaving his men to their fate. Seldom has such an outrageous performance been perpetrated by a hitherto valiant leader. The indignation of those few who grasped what was happening can be imagined. For a moment, when his fast galley overtook the Queen’s flagship, the crew must have expected Cleopatra to scorn the craven, to refuse to take him on board. However, even a queen could not quite do that, one supposes. She gave her orders and Antony, frantic and panting, was hauled up on deck.
Without a word to him, Cleopatra retired to her cabin. For three days she stayed there, ignoring him, while the ship flew on toward Egypt. For three days he sat motionless in the prow, in abject disgrace, sunk in confused despair. Then at last Cleopatra admitted him to her cabin, but the rift had grown too wide to bridge: it must have been one of the most miserable of reconciliations. We cannot envy either one of the unhappy pair. Antony had lost his last spark of pride. He was finished, and they both knew it.
News of the abandoned battle came trickling in, further disheartening Queen and consort. On land, Antony’s forces had done far better than had been hoped, but as soon as word went out that their leader had deserted, they naturally surrendered to Octavian’s army. Greece was lost to the Roman ruler, and so, in time, was Africa. Once Antony attempted in a halfhearted way to commit suicide, but he was restrained, without difficulty, by friends, and he didn’t try again. This was thoroughly shameful. Nothing could be more contemptible, in the opinion of the ancients, than to fail in an honorable suicide, unless it was to avoid committing suicide altogether. Under the circumstances, Antony should have killed himself. It was most embarrassing.
The Queen returned to the royal palace at Alexandria, but Antony, who was not invited to accompany her, took refuge in a piece of maudlin play-acting. He moved into a lonely little house on a pier in the great harbor, within view of the palace, and announced that henceforth he would live in imitation of Timon of Athens, the misanthrope. There, he said, he would end his days, cut off from all men, hating his kind. And there for quite a long time he actually stayed, solacing himself with wine and forgetfulness.
Followed a weary, unedifying period during which the actors in this drama went on behaving in their characteristic ways, quite as if Fate would be forever delayed in closing in on them. Like nobler Achilles, Antony sulked in his little hut. Cleopatra, ignoring him, planned new forays, started new fortifications, and managed her unwieldy kingdom as best she might on her own. All the while the pursuing Octavian drew nearer and nearer to the final inevitable scene, the conquest of Egypt and vengeance on Antony, that many-times turncoat.
Then came the climax. Octavian fell upon the Egyptians, but it was not a clean, dramatic battle, for he knew his enemy’s weaknesses and he preferred to lure the Army to his side. It was easy, he found, to bribe most of the officers, and the Queen automatically became his prisoner as soon as her army was won over. There are various versions of what went on during the interview between Octavian and Cleopatra.
I find it difficult to believe, as some historians tell us, that the Queen refused to give up Antony to the conqueror in exchange for her own safety with honor. I don’t think he made any such offer. Octavian did not have to ask the helpless Queen for custody of Antony. The Roman renegade was his in any case, sooner or later, for the taking. Nor can I swallow the Shakespearean version of her message which went wrong by accident. There was Cleopatra, still alive and well in the royal mausoleum with her women. How could any message passing from the mausoleum to the fugitive get so garbled on the way that he was led by mistake to believe that she was dead?
I am sure Cleopatra sent the lie on purpose.
She knew what she was doing; deliberately she tricked him, knowing he would commit suicide. There could have been no grief in her heart when she did it. Vengeance and honor were her motives. For months, every day Antony lived had been a fresh reproach to Cleopatra. He was her husband, and honor demanded that he die by his own hand; death, indeed, was long overdue. Sodden coward though he was, there was still the chance that he might kill himself if his one remaining prop was withdrawn. Quite coldly, I think, Cleopatra withdrew it, and I for one respect her for the deed.
Afterward, when she realized that Octavian would not spare her public humiliation, or allow her children to live in the style to which she was convinced they were entitled, she calmly killed herself as well. That part, I feel, was one of the easiest tasks Cleopatra fulfilled in her far from easy life. “Very well done,” the dying Charmian said, and Charmian was right.
*Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, by Weigall (Putnam, 1914).
Henry the Inevitable
Henry the VIII
Of course there is Henry VIII. One cannot leave him out of any history of the Western world, though, to be quite frank, this writer had a good try at doing it. My reluctance was twofold; first, I felt that Henry has already been discussed and interpreted far more than most monarchs, and second I dislike him so intensely that it was an effort, at the beginning, to polish up my knowledge. Early thoughts are often erroneous, however, and mine in this case are no exception. I am glad now that I had to reread so much about Henry VIII. One forgets that there is much more to him than the Charles Laughton performance, memorable though it be.
What he did to history was not so important as how he did it. If Henry VIII had not broken away from the Church of Rome, someone else would have. It had to be: not even the Church could hold onto the entire world. England was, to the Pope, a distant colony, and the Pope must have seemed to colonies and colonials a far-off tyrant, an absentee landlord. As people grew up on the periphery of the Holy Empire they inevitably began to think for themselves, and from this thought to chafing against the unknown Holy Father’s strictures was a short step. Sooner or later there was bound to be a breakaway. Had it not been caused by Henry’s divorce the rupture would have been brought about by another quarrel and perhaps another king. However, it was Henry VIII who did it, which was unfortunate not only for his victims but himself as well. It is doubtful if any other sovereign, even in those unprincipled days, would have shown the strain to such disastrous effect. The National Gallery portrait of this man as a stripling invariably brings the visitor to a halt, while he stares incredulously. Can this lovely youth possibly be Henry? There must be some mistake. Whatever can have happened to turn him into the mean-faced fatty of Holbein’s picture?
Of course, as we know, plenty happened, and it cannot be wondered at that Henry’s face should have changed. Oscar Wilde may well have seen those two portraits when he thought of Dorian Gray.
The worst thing about Henry was not that he was a murderer, a coward, and invariably false to his most faithful friends, though all of these are true. By far his most revolting trait was his self-complacency. That is what shows in the Holbein portrait, islanded in the middle of the heavy oblong face—the prissy, cruel, pursed little mouth. This is not to say he was always happy about himself. He had moments of self-questioning, like everyone else; especially must he have smarted heavily under the shame of discovering how his fifth wife Katheryn had married him not for love, but to be Queen. But he never thought that any of these things were his fault.
Incidentally, most women will wonder how he could have thought his wives were actuated by any motive but ambition. Presumably he looked at himself in the glass.… But they will not wonder long, if they know men. Henry VIII was a man whose normal masculine failings were magnified by his royal status to—well, to king size. Thus, he was self-complacent enough to marry again and again, comfortably confident each time that his wife adored him, until Katheryn spoke with such calamitous frankness before the chopping block.
Henry is not the only man by far who has done the sort of thing he did, but he is just about the only one who managed to kill so many outside people in the process. It wasn’t only the women directly involved who suffered. Haroun-al-Raschid, in that case, would have more than matched Henry. But out of his first petulant defiance of the Pope grew the schism between Rome and England, and directly as a result of that schism came Henry’s bloody crimes of execution. He murdered, robbed, betrayed, schemed; yet the worse he became the less did he think he was at fault. The world might betray him, the very Pope might misinterpret God’s will, but Henry stood firm. He consulted his conscience, buttoned up his nasty little mouth, and went ahead, destroying whatever he thought stood in his way. He was romantic, sentimental, poetic, like a weeping rhinoceros. One doesn’t mind an ordinary murderer so much, but he was a sanctimonious sneak. The horror of the picture is increased a hundredfold by that mouth.
Really, one’s sympathy for Henry can be evoked only at the beginning of his kingship, when he had not yet fallen into the habit of being sorry for himself. It is at the most a mechanical, anachronistic sympathy. We happen to live in a civilization in which marriage is supposedly based on love, or at least on personal, free choice. This conception of marriage is so important to us that even our dwindling supply of monarchs is ruled by it to some extent. Thus a prince or princess who marries according to government arrangement is invariably declared to have made a love match. Admittedly, when a prince or princess does actually make a love match not arranged by the government the reaction of the public is not one of wholehearted approval. Usually the offending royalty is pushed out of the way to end his days in some neutral sunny clime. But this does not in the least affect the pretty fable. Kings and queens nowadays, we firmly declare, marry for love. It is really quite simple; any king with his country’s welfare at heart need only remember to fall in love with an eligible girl rather than an ineligible one. And I must say, when one thinks of Henry VIII there is something to be said for our point of view.
When Henry was only ten his elder brother Arthur, the fifteen-year-old heir apparent, was married to Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, because it was the best political move his father Henry VII could think of at the time. It was the custom to go through the religious form of this sort of marriage as early as possible, since on one side or the other, whichever had most to gain, there was eagerness to get the contract settled before some other principality should step in and steal the prize. Mere betrothals could be broken; they were friable contracts. Marriages, however, were hard and fast. The Pope saw to that.
Sometimes these marriages of state took place when the bride, or groom, was too young for sexual intercourse, and it was because of such a situation that Henry’s first troubles with the Church were to arise. Catherine was sixteen and mature. But was Arthur capable? He was only fifteen and rather sickly, but the court let Nature take its own course. Just what course Nature took still remains undecided by public opinion, there being two schools of thought on it, one led by those who believe Catherine and the other by Henry’s supporters. It is strange that any ambiguity should ever have attached to the question. Delicacy would not have restrained courtiers from finding out every detail of the wedding night, after the young couple had been undressed and put to bed together; delicacy in such matters was unknown in 1501. Arthur’s potency, moreover, was of legitimate interest to all his prospective subjects. Unfortunately, however, there was ambiguity, and the question was to become burningly important on two occasions, once before Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and again, to an intense degree, when he tried to get a divorce. The truth must have been known to a number of people, but after some years and under bullying they forgot it. Even Catherine might possibly have forgotten. Such lapses of memory in girls are not uncommon.
One of the attendant nobles told a silly little story, it seems, the morning after the wedding nigh
t. Arthur, he said, on awakening, called to him from the curtained bed and demanded a cup of warm wine, announcing that marriage was thirsty work. The Prince of Wales added, “Last night I was in the midst of Spain.” Whether he really said it or not, this trivial bit of schoolboy prurience was to rock the world before it was forgotten.
Arthur was consumptive. He died a few months after the wedding, and now the second son Henry was Prince of Wales, and what on earth were they to do with Catherine, that childish widow? An embarrassing question. She had brought a good dowry, according to the agreements, when she married Arthur, but only half of it had actually been paid. Ferdinand and Isabella, bargaining to save that half, argued that she should now marry Henry, Prince of Wales, but the English retorted that it was very much against Church teachings that a man should marry his brother’s wife. And they were right: according to Leviticus 20:21 it was impurity. “… he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.” One doesn’t know exactly why a man’s sister-in-law’s nakedness should be his brother’s nakedness as well, but there it was in the Bible, mysterious and terrifying. There was only one way out: very likely even that was blocked. Had Catherine and Arthur had sexual intercourse? If they had, all was settled; but if they hadn’t, then they hadn’t really been man and wife, and it would not be sin for Catherine to marry Henry.
Catherine said she was a virgin. A report was made after examination; Catherine was a virgin, said the examiners. So that was all right, said the Spaniards triumphantly.
