high birth and
royal rights, and violent in defending them, is most natural; but I
cannot agree with those who think that in the mind of Constance,
_ambition_--that is, the love of dominion for its own sake--is either a
strong motive or a strong feeling: it could hardly be so where the
natural impulses and the ideal power predominate in so high a degree.
The vehemence with which she asserts the just and legal rights of her
son is that of a fond mother and a proud-spirited woman, stung with the
sense of injury, and herself a reigning sovereign,--by birth and right,
if not in fact: yet when bereaved of her son, grief not only "fills the
room up of her absent child," but seems to absorb every other faculty
and feeling--even pride and anger. It is true that she exults over him
as one whom nature and fortune had destined to be _great_, but in her
distraction for his loss, she thinks of him only as her "Pretty Arthur."

O lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrow's cure!

No other feeling can be traced through the whole of her frantic scene:
it is grief only, a mother's heart-rending, soul-absorbing grief, and
nothing else. Not even indignation, or the desire of revenge, interfere
with its soleness and intensity. An ambitious woman would hardly have
thus addressed the cold, wily Cardinal:--

And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say,
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again:
For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost;
As dim and merge as an ague's fit;
And so he'll die; and rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heaven
I shall not know him: therefore never, never.
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more!

The bewildered pathos and poetry of this address could be natural in no
woman, who did not unite, like Constance, the most passionate
sensibility with the most vivid imagination.

It is true that Queen Elinor calls her on one occasion, "ambitious
Constance;" but the epithet is rather the natural expression of Elinor's
own fear and hatred than really applicable.[87] Elinor, in whom age had
subdued all passions but