Shrewsbury by Stanley J. Weyman

Apprised by what I heard, not only that I stood in the Gallery of Kensington Court -- a mansion which His Majesty had lately bought from Lord Nottingham, and made his favourite residence -- but that the gentleman in black whom I had found so simply employed was no other than the King himself, I ask you to imagine with what interest I looked upon him. He whom the old King of France had dubbed in bitter derision, the "Little Squire of -- -- ," and whom two revolutions had successfully created Stadtholder of Holland and Sovereign of these Isles, was at this time forty-six years old, already prematurely bent, and a prey to the asthma which afflicted his later life. Reserved in manner, and sombre, not to say melancholy, in aspect, hiding strong passions behind a pale mask of stoicism as chilling to his friends as it was baffling to his enemies, he was such as a youth spent under the eyes of watchful foes, and a manhood in the prosecution of weighty and secret designs, made him. Descended on the one side from William the Silent, on the other from the great Henry of France, he was thought to exhibit, in more moderate degree, the virtues and failings which marked those famous princes, and to represent, not in blood only, but in his fortunes, the two soldiers of the sixteenth century whose courage in disaster and skill in defeat still passed for a proverb; who, frequently beaten in the field, not seldom garnered the fruits of the campaign, and rose, Antaeus-like, the stronger from every fall.

That, in all stations, as a private person, a Stadtholder and a King, his late Majesty remembered the noble sources whence he sprang, was proved, I think, not only by the exactness with which his life was wrought to the pattern of those old mottoes of his house, _S[oe]vus tranquillus in Undis_, and _Tandem fit Surculus arbor_, whereof the former was borne, I have read, by the Taciturn, and the latter by Maurice of Nassau -- but of two other particulars of which I beg leave to mention. The first was that _more majorum_ he took naturally and from the first the lead as the champion of the Protestant religion in Europe; the second, that though he had his birth in a republic, and was called to be King by election (so that it was no uncommon thing for some of his subjects to put slights upon him as little more than their equal -- ay, and though he had to bear such affronts in silence), he had the true spirit and pride of a King born in the purple, and by right divine. Insomuch that many attributed to this the gloom and reserve of his manners; maintaining that these were assumed less as a shield against the malice of his enemies, than as a cloak to abate the familiarity of his friends.