The psalmist’s enemies were speaking evil of him: when should he die, and his name perish? All that hated him were whispering together against him, and devising hurt. But this he could bear, on the part of declared foes. What he could not bear was that his own familiar friend, in whom he trusted, and who ate of his bread, should have lifted up his heel against him.

Hengstenberg remarks that in Judas the expression, “Which did eat of my bread,” receives its full, its frightful verification, in the fact of his participating in the Last Supper—to say nothing of habitually sharing in previous and everyday meals.

Even a comparatively slight wound may be severe when dealt by a friend. Dr. Colani thinks that never could the Son of man have felt so acutely the pain caused by opposition and non-recognition as when He received the message from John the Baptist, inquiring into the credentials of His Divine mission. That the rulers of the people, that one of the twelve, that those of His own kin, should doubt or dispute His mission, was hard enough to bear, but perhaps easy to foresee. But when he who had baptized Him, who had, so to speak, revealed Him to Himself,—when His “spiritual father” took his stand among the doubters, “Jesus must have felt a heartrending surprise, a veritable consternation:” for the Baptist was not a reed shaken with the wind, and yet, if the Divine hand rested on that support, what but a reed was it, to pierce, even while it gave way?

The Et tu, Brute! of dying Cæsar is a large utterance, hardly more deep in reproachful pathos than wide of application. The bitterness of its import, varying in intensity, has sufficed to choke bad men and good and indifferent,—as a pang more sharp than all. What stung Jugurtha to the heart was the treachery of his confidential agent, Bomilcar, who intrigued to betray him to the Romans. What Cicero professes to have felt most keenly, during the Clodian troubles, was the perfidious conduct to him of that Serranus to whom, when consul, he had been so kind; nor was it the least bitter drop in the cup he had to drain at the last, that the leader of the band who took his life was one whose life Cicero had once saved, as counsel for the defence. Antony in the tragedy is naturally made to brood most resentfully on the being betrayed by one on whose bosom he had “slept secure of injured faith.” He can forgive a foe, but not a friend:

Herod the Great felt the pang when that dark and horrible secret, as Milman calls it, came to light, that Antipater, the beloved son, for whom he had imbrued his hands in the blood of his own children—Antipater, the heir of his kingdom—was “clearly proved to have conspired with Pheroras (B.C. 5) to poison his old and doting father, and thus to secure and accelerate his own succession.” Michelet’s narrative of the decline and death of the Emperor Frederick II. comprises this record: “Finally his chancellor, his dearest friend, Peter de Vineâ, attempted to poison him. After this last blow it only remained for him to veil his face, like Cæsar on the ides of March.” And familiar to us all is the story of our Henry II., sick and bedridden, inquiring the names of the supporters of his rebellious son Richard. He was for declaring John, the youngest of his sons, and as he thought the most attached to him, heir to all his continental dominions. But on hearing the name of his beloved John, highest on the list of Richard’s adherents, Henry was seized with a sort of convulsive agitation, sat up in bed, and gazing around with searching and haggard look, exclaimed, “Can it be true that John, my heart, the son of my choice, on whom I doted more than on all the rest, and my love for whom has brought on me all my woes, has fallen from me?” Assured that so it was, “Well then,” sighed Henry, falling back on his bed, and turning his face to the wall, “henceforward let all go on as it may; I no longer care for myself nor for the world.” And in this connection may be mentioned the dying exclamation of Henry’s murdered chancellor. “What is this, Reginald?” cried Becket to Fitzurse, when the latter made up to him, bared sword in hand: “I have loaded you with favours, and you come to me armed, and in the church?” The last stroke that broke down the aged Pope Boniface VIII., bowed with the weight of eighty-six years, was the defection of his favourite and favoured nephew. One may apply to such defections the upbraidal in a latter-day poem on Old Pictures in Florence:

Most painful to Luther, in his last moments, was the controversy forced upon him by the defection of so dear a friend as Agricola, the leader of the Antinomians. He had long before that expressed his “astoundment” at the secession of Œcolampadius and Regius, and other intimate associates. “Why should I fret and fume against the papists?” he wrote in 1531: “all they have done against me has been in fair, open war; we are declared enemies, and act as such. They who hurt me are my own dear children. My brothers, fraterculi mei, aurei amiculi mei.... I thought I had gone through, had exhausted all the adversities the evil one could inflict; but it was not so. My Absalom, the child of my heart, had not deserted his father, had not poured out ignominy upon David; my Judas, the traitor who delivered up his master, had not sold me: he has done so now.”

If Mary Stuart had any quarter to which, in her disastrous condition, she might look for love and favour, it was, says the most popular of historians of Scotland, her brother Murray. His kindness and compassion she deserved, after loading him with favours, as well as pardoning him considerable offences. But his acceptance of the regency broke all remaining ties of tenderness betwixt him and his sister. Scott is not romancing when, in an historical romance, he describes her reception of the news. “The queen gave a sort of shriek, and clapping her hands together, exclaimed, ‘Comes the arrow out of his quiver?—out of my brother’s bow?’” When Elizabeth appointed commissioners to inquire into Mary’s case, the Regent Murray appeared before them, “in the odious character of the accuser of his sister, benefactress, and sovereign.” To adopt the sentiment of the most sententious of stage moralists, When ingratitude barbs the dart of injury, the wound has double danger in it.

What touched Cortez most nearly, at the time of the expulsion from Mexico, was to find the name of his trusted friend, his intimado, his privado, the secretary Duero, at the head of the paper of remonstrance presented by his disaffected soldiers. We find Louis XVI., on the eve of his execution, inquiring with calm curiosity, and as though not personally affected, how certain members of the convention whom he knew had voted at his trial. Told that his cousin of Orleans had voted for his death, “Ah!” he exclaimed to Malesherbes, “that affects me more than all the rest.” It was, remarks Lamartine, the comment of Cæsar when he recognised the face of Brutus amongst his murderers; he alone roused him to speak.

So spake the captain of Plymouth, but with more of anger in his sorrow, in the New England hexameters devoted by Longfellow to Miles Standish, when he charged John Alder with having supplanted, defrauded, betrayed him:—

It was the revolt of his beloved son Conrad which crushed to the earth the emperor Henry IV. What Dean Milman calls “the almost fatal effect” of his conduct on his father, can only be ascribed to profound affection, deeply, cruelly, wantonly wounded. “The revolt of Conrad seemed to crush the aged Emperor to the earth. He had borne all the vicissitudes of his earlier life with unbroken courage, he had risen from his humiliation at Canosa with refreshed energy; he now abandoned himself to despair, threw off the robes and insignia of royalty, and was hardly prevented by his friends from falling on his own sword.”—There is a spice of the et tu Brute bitterness in Becket’s exclamation to John of Poitiers, when even that most ardent of his admirers followed him to Etampes, and implored him to yield. “And you too,” cried the primate, in a pang of wrath, “will you strangle us”—ut quid nos et vos strangulatis?—The great Emperor Frederick II. reproached Pope Gregory IX., in the height of their contest, as having been, while in the lower orders of the Church, his familiar friend; but that no sooner had he reached the height of his ambition than he threw off all gratitude, and became his determined foe.—When Queen Elizabeth broke out on a party of the peers for urging her whither she would not, Norfolk she as good as called traitor and conspirator, and Pembroke she said talked like a foolish soldier; but to Leicester it was that she exclaimed, “You, my lord, you! If all the world forsook me I thought that you would be true!”—Charles I.’s celebrated letter to Prince Rupert after the loss of Bristol, depriving him of his command, begins with assuring him that the surrender, in such a manner, and by his trusted, no longer trusty nephew, of that most important city, was the greatest trial of his constancy that had yet befallen him: “For what is to be done, after one that is so near me as you are, both in blood and friendship, submits himself to so mean an action (I give it the easiest term)? such—I have so much to say, that I will say no more of it.” The tone is that of the duke in Mr. Browning’s Colombe’s Birthday:

Corneille, in his historical tragedy of Cinna, treats in a like strain the effect upon Augustus of the discovered conspiracy:

But a later scene proves that Augustus is not even yet aware of all the accomplices; and the conviction of Æmilie as one of them, wrings from him, as Brutus from the elder Cæsar, the upbraiding cry, Et toi, ma fille, aussi!

One touching incident marks the horror of the murder of the Czar Paul in 1801. The dress of Ouvaroff, one of the conspirators, is said to have caused him to be mistaken by the Emperor for his son Constantine; and, according to Bignon, the last words which the unhappy monarch uttered were, “And you too, my Constantine!”

Very worthless objects have sometimes been very undeservedly Et-tu-Brutefied. The first Lord Holland, when forsaken by the selfish friends, as they have justly been described, with whom he had jobbed and made merry and laughed at principle, had yet retained enough belief in the social virtues to be made seriously unhappy by the conduct of his worthless companions, particularly by that of Rigby, the most worthless of them all;

A man as pious as Henry Fox was otherwise, has declared that he knew few things which so darken one’s views of the moral government of God, as the experience of baseness and treachery in persons who have won our confidence; that it tempts one to question the reality of human virtue, to suspect the hollowness of all appearance of truth and piety, whence there is but a step to calling in question the moral purpose for which we are placed on earth. Hawthorne somewhere intimates that the young and pure are not apt to find out how actually sin is in the world, until that miserable truth is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend. “Trust ye not in a friend,”—but ah, the pity of it, for him who has to take up with these words of the Morasthite,—“A man’s enemies are the men of his own house.”—How many variations on this general theme might be played from Shakespeare’s plays! Sir Valentine, for instance, denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called, Gentleman of Verona:

Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop, of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,—

Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for him,—“for this revolt of thine, methinks, is like another fall of man.”—A later king of England, Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among the supporters of the foe: “Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too? Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down.”—And once again, there is the Et tu Brute cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its suggestive force by Shakespeare’s Antony:

But as we recur to this, as the first among these secular annotations on a Scripture text, so we recur to Scripture, in conclusion, for a pathetic parallel, also from the Book of Psalms: “For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it; neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me: then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.” The companionship past intensifies the cruelty present. Without so recent and vivid a remembrance of sweet counsel together, and companionship hallowed by the sanctuary itself, the present cruelty could have been borne; but with them it hardly can.