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BY
F R E D E R I C L E A K E.
ALBANY, N. Y.:
RIGGS PRINTING & PUBLISHING CO.,
1896.
Copyright, 1896
BY
Riggs Printing and Publishing Company
Once upon a time I was a member of that arch-erudite body, the Faculty of Williams College, and I took my turn in putting forth lectures tending or pretending to edification. I was not to the manner born, and had indulged even to indigestion, in the reading of history. These ebullitions are what came of that intemperance.
The manuscripts were lying harmless in a bureau drawer, under gynæcian strata, when, last summer, a near and rummaging relative, a printer, unearthed them, read them, and asked leave to publish them. I refused; but after conventional hesitation, I—still vowing I would ne’er consent—consented.
With this diagnosis, I abandon them to the printer and the public. Those who read them will form opinions of them, and some who read them not, will do the same thing in accordance with a tempting canon of criticism.
F. L.
Williamstown, Mass., 1896.
IN the north-east corner of the map of England, or, if you are a Scotchman, in the south-east corner of the map of Scotland, you will find the town of Berwick.
That town was held first to belong to Scotland, and then to England. Then the lawyers tried their hand at it, and made out that it belonged to neither—that a writ issued either in England or Scotland, would not run in Berwick-on-Tweed. So an act of Parliament was passed in the reign of George II., to extend the authority of the British realm to that evasive municipality.
The name is pronounced Berrick. It is a rule in England to spell proper names one way and pronounce them another: thus Edinburgh is Edinboro, Derby is Darby, Brougham is Broom, Cholmondeley is Chumly and so on. This rule is sometimes inconvenient. An American tourist wished to visit the home of Charlotte Brontë. He asked the way to Haworth. Ha-worth! Nobody had ever heard of such a place. No such place in that part of England. At last somebody guessed that this stray foreigner wanted to go to Hawth. Haworth is Hawth.
But that act of Parliament did not decree that folks should say Berrick and not Berwick; and even if it had, it would not be of force in this country; so the reader may pronounce it just as he pleases.
From that town was derived the ducal title of my subject.
In November, 1873, I sailed for England. Among my shipmates was Lord Alfred Churchill an uncle of the present duke of Marlborough, and a descendent of John Churchill duke of Marlborough the famous general of Queen Anne. Walking the deck one day with Lord Alfred, I asked him about his family—not about his wife and children—that would not have been good manners; but about the historic line from which he sprang. I asked how it was that he was a Churchill, when he was descended not from a son but from a daughter of the great duke. He explained that an act of parliament had authorised Charles Spencer, earl of Sunderland, son-in-law of the duke, not only to take the title of duke of Marlborough, but to change his name from Spencer to Churchill.
There can be no better evidence of the overshadowing glory of the great captain than that the house of Sunderland should so nearly suppress the old, aristocratic name of Spencer, in favor of the new, the parvenu Churchill. The Spencers came in with the Conqueror, and we meet them often in history. We well remember the two Spencers, father and son, who were executed in the reign of Edward II. on a charge of high-treason; and that bizarre historian A’Becket says that the sad tale of those Spencers led afterwards to the introduction of spencers without any tail at all.
I asked his lordship what had become of the Berwick branch of the Churchills. He answered drily that he did not know—so drily in fact that I inferred he had forgotten there had ever been such a branch.
In order to introduce that branch I must ask you to go back with me to the middle of the seventeenth century.
Charles Stuart, Charles II. sits on the throne of England, or rather perambulates about it, for he is a great walker: he and his dogs are always in motion; and his favorite breed of those animals is still known as the King Charles spaniel.
Charles was a witty and a disreputable monarch: one current view of him is that he never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one.
Charles had married Catharine of Braganza a daughter of that John of Braganza who had rescued Portugal from the yoke of the Spanish Hapsburgs, and founded the present dynasty. Catharine bore no children, and the next heir to the crown, was James duke of York brother of Charles. The two brothers were unlike in everything but general worthlessness: Charles was an idler and a scoffer; James a busybody and a devoted—not exactly devout—Roman Catholic. Both were fond of women; but mark the difference! Charles gathered to him handsome ones only; and they were truly handsome, as their portraits still testify. James fell in love so perseveringly with homely ones, that Charles said in his ribald way, that it was the priests who imposed those girls on James as a penance.
Among the damsels who won James’ heart, was Anne daughter of Sir Edward Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon. Now Miss Anne Hyde though respectable, was certainly no match for the blood-royal, for the heir apparent; and James after having gained her affections, sought to jilt her. What led him to think better of it is not clear: stories differ: it is even said that her father himself opposed the marriage out of prudence and politics, just as Cardinal Mazarin prevented Louis XIV. from marrying his niece Olympia with whom the young king was desperately in love. Another legend is that Sir Edward came and knelt before the king and pleaded the cause of his daughter; and Charles told James he must marry that girl. At all events, he did marry her.
Little homely Anne Hyde was now great duchess of York, wife of the heir apparent, prospective queen of England. Among her maids of honor was Arabella daughter of Sir Winston Churchill a country gentlemen of credit and renown. Arabella had a homely face—there is augury in that—but her form was symmetrical. She was a bold horseman—or horsewoman if you insist. James was equally equestrian, so he and Arabella were often companions. One day Miss Churchill had mounted the most unruly animal in the duke’s stables. Her horse reared and kicked and plunged so violently that in spite of her horsemanship, (not horsewomanship,) she was thrown to the ground. James sprang to her aid. He passed his arm around that shapely bodice and looked into that plain face as he raised her up; and his susceptible heart was transfixed once more.
On the 21. August 1670, there was born James Fitzjames, James the son of James and of Arabella Churchill. It was a lusty scion, Churchill through and through; very little of the Stuart perceptible. Leaving the brat to kick and yell and thrive—but don’t forget him—we will consider some other of his relatives—respectable folks all, and moving in the best society, or I should not venture to introduce them to my readers.
Arabella had a brother named John who, you see, was uncle to the little Fitzjames. But for this unclehood and this brotherhood, we probably would never have heard of John. There might have been no Blenheim, no Ramilies, no Oudenard, no Malplaquet, in fine, no duke of Marlborough. James seeing that his morganatic brother-in-law was resolved to be a soldier, sent him to France to serve under Turenne; and John did not waste his time.
Another of the boy’s relations was William of Orange who was his first cousin and married his half sister Mary daughter of James. William is the hero, not of this story which is authentic, but of that fascinating romance Macaulay’s History of England. William was endowed with all the talents and perhaps with one or two of the many virtues attributed to him in that romance. He was as licentious as his uncles Charles and James, and was still keeping his odalisques at the very hour when Macaulay pictures him to us, wringing his hands over his dying wife. He was cruel and even blood-thirsty: the massacre of Glencoe has left a stain on his memory which no romance can wash out. As we shall see presently, he would have put to death this very boy, had he not been held back by a hand which the fate of battle had made stronger than his. He was the last able king of England; but he broke down the power of the crown by impoverishing it. (Blackstone, Book 1. Chapter 8.) He squandered the crown lands not only upon the Dutch adventurers who had followed him from Holland, the Bentincks, the Zulesteins, the Auverquerques, the Keppels who thus fattened and battened upon the English people, but upon more questionable favorites, upon the partners of his private vices, to such an extent that at his death parliament took back what he had given to the women, but the men being politicians found means to keep their share.
In 1685, Charles II. died. He was but 55. He had been temperate in eating and drinking and had taken plenty of exercise, and in the ordinary course of nature, was good for twenty years yet. But he had caught cold and had a touch of vertigo. The doctors came and bled him. It did him no good, because a bleeding never did anybody any good. The next day they came and bled him a second time, and that did him no good, because a second bleeding never did anybody any good. So they came the third day and bled him a third time and that settled him. A Roman Catholic priest was smuggled up the back stairs; the scoffer was shrived and was gathered to his fathers—the Stuarts, the Tudors, the Plantagenets, the Bourbons, the Valois; and his brother James reigned in his stead.
Two years after his accession, James conferred the title of Duke of Berwick on the boy Fitzjames who was now seventeen. It was a barren title no estates annexed; but it was his father’s gift, and with filial piety he cleaved to it his whole life, in preference to other and better endowed patents of nobility which his sword won for him.
He too must be a soldier: the Churchill half of him would have scorned any peaceful course of life; so his father sent him to France to study the art of war in the same school where his uncle John had graduated. When he was nineteen, western Europe being at peace, he got leave of his father to offer his services to the emperor who was fighting the Turks, and was sore pressed by those misbelievers. James gave him a letter to an Irishman in the imperial service, named Taft who had held the rank of colonel, and had just been made a general. Taft had influence enough with the commander-in-chief, the duke of Lorraine, to give to Berwick the regiment he had left.
The Turks lay encamped on the spot where a hundred years before, they had won the first battle of Mohacs, and what still added to their self-confidence, was that the duke of Lorraine, in obedience to the emperor’s orders, had attacked their position and been repulsed; and now scorning to act longer on the defensive, they marched upon the Christians. A bloody struggle followed in which victory was wrested from the hand of the Moslem. Berwick in his memoirs says that the Imperialists lost only ten thousand men—only ten thousand men! How many Turks fell in that dreadful day, he does not report. Perhaps like a good Catholic he thought that misbelievers, especially dead misbelievers were not worth the counting. He says next to nothing about his own share in the battle; but from the fact that he was immediately promoted, it may be inferred that the boy did not belie the blood of Churchill in all that carnage.
He did not remain long in the Emperor’s service. His father now needed the aid of every one of the few friends that were left him; and Berwick returned to England. We all know that James lost his crown by undertaking to reëstablish the Roman Catholic religion in England; but he was by no means the natural fool for thinking of such a thing that Macaulay represents him to be.
In the whole history of national religions there is no other instance of such inconstancy as had been shown by the English in that and the preceding century. At the beck of Henry VIII., they renounced the pope and all his works. But Henry told them that he himself was now pope in England, so they still cleaved to popery: they bowed the knee to a Cockney pope instead of to an Italian pope. In the reign of Henry’s son Edward VI., they went over body and soul to protestantism, priests and all. Then under his sister Mary, Bloody Mary, they all hurried back to the Mass and the Breviary. I know there were some exceptions, John Rogers and all that, but they were too few to invalidate the rule. In the next reign, that of Elizabeth, they changed their creed the fourth time. The Venitian ambassador at the court of Elizabeth, wrote home that the English would turn Turks or Jews to save their persons or their pockets. Nor did this pliability of faith end there. James himself remembered the day when, at the preaching of a few saints in jack-boots and spurs, half of England stopped going decorously to church, and repeating devoutly the liturgy, and fell to singing psalms through the nose. Let me say in parenthesis, that it was then that a certain nasal drawl came to be considered the mark of vital piety, and it was then that these northern States were colonised. As we Americans have remained more pious than the English, we have retained more of that peculiar accent.
Cromwell died; jack-boots and spurs ceased to be evangelists; nasal psalmody went out of fashion; and the Church of England was restored. Was it strange that James should persuade himself that he could make the English people turn one more somerset? But he was not the man to do it, and his friends told him so. Louis XIV. warned him to be careful. The archbishop of Rheims suggested that a mass might not be worth three kingdoms. In the meantime the pope, Innocent the eleventh, was working in a curious subterranean way against him. Louis had insulted Innocent and imprisoned his nuncio; and the pope was ready to league himself even with protestants to put on the English throne a dynasty hostile to the French king.
England had but recently escaped from under the iron heel of the saints; and she dreaded their return to power as much as the pope’s. Consequently the Church of England which James’ grandfather (James I.) said was the only church for a gentleman, was once more the strongest ecclesiastical body in the land. If James had been a little tolerant and let the bishops alone he might at least have reëstablished Roman Catholicism as the religion of the Court; but he was a fanatic and must have the whole or nothing; and he got the latter.
The English, split up into different sects which hated each other with theological hatred, lost confidence in themselves. A foreign prince and a foreign army were called in as in the days of James’ worthless ancestor King John. William of Holland with an army of Dutchmen landed at Torbay the fifth of November 1688; and England once more suffered the humiliation of an invasion. It was at this juncture that Berwick arrived in England, and took command of the king’s household troops which his uncle Marlborough had abandoned. Nobody contributed more to the overthrow of James than John Churchill who owed him everything. He and his shrew of a wife Sarah had influence enough with Anne, James’ youngest daughter, and with her husband George of Denmark, to lead them too to desert their father and to go over to William and Mary.
Anne was a stupid girl and made a stupid queen; but her stupidity was but a mild form of that lesion in comparison with that which afflicted her husband. We have King Charles’ own testimony on that point. Supping one day with James, he said to him:—Brother James I have tried our nephew George drunk and I have tried him sober, and drunk or sober there is nothing in him. George had a stolid way of exclaiming Est-il possible! When James was told that his daughter and son-in-law had abandoned him: What, cried he, has Est-il possible gone too?
James was now reminded of the day when they cut his father’s head off,[1] and he thought it time to quit. He fled and William and Mary mounted the throne. They were not the next heirs: one little life stood between and one only—that of the infant son of James and of his second wife Mary Beatrice of Esté. But though, as Macaulay himself admits, no birth was ever better attested, all England was made to believe that the child was spurious. Even Mary and Anne gave countenance to that infamous story. That child was afterwards known as the Pretender or James III.
The revolution of 1688, which drove out James and put upon the throne William and Mary, was a long step forward in the history of English liberty; but the personal share in it of the daughters and sons-in-law of James, was not commendable. King Lear’s daughters were less unfilial than Mary and Anne. Goneril and Regan did not drive their old father out into the storm: it was his own high temper that did that: he was furious that they would not entertain his hundred knights. They, the daughters, wanted him to sit by the fireside and let the housemaid bring him his slippers. He insisted on traipsing through the house at the head of a hundred stalking fellows, tracking the mud over everything; and I leave it to any good housewife if the girls were not right.
But Mary and Anne and William drove the poor old king from his throne, from his home and from his country, and he died in exile.
Mary is Macaulay’s heroine, yet to make a point he cannot help relating her untimely glee, running from room to room in the palace of Whitehall, delighted to find herself the mistress of so fine a house from which she had just expelled her own father.
James fled to France, and Berwick went with him. Among other devoted friends who left their country and joined their fortunes to those of the banished king, was an Irish gentleman named MacMahon. From him was descended Marie Edmée Patrice Maurice MacMahon whilom president of the Republic of France.
A few years later Berwick accompanied his father in his expedition to Ireland which had remained faithful to him. That expedition came to grief, as you know, at the battle of the Boyne, in which Berwick took part. In another action during that campaign, he had two horses killed under him, and was himself wounded. He says in his memoirs, that that was the only wound he ever received; but he did receive one besides, and we shall see by and by why he never mentions it.
On his return to France, Berwick became a French subject, and entered the French army for the rest of his life. Under the last two kings, Charles and James, England had been the ally of France. Louis XIV. was their first cousin, all three being grand-children of Henry IV. William’s mother a sister of Charles and James, was equally of course cousin to Louis; but there was nobody on earth that William hated as he did the French king. Nor was this hatred without a cause: Louis had invaded and desolated William’s native country, Holland, chiefly because a Dutch envoy who had not been brought up in refined society, had told a French envoy to go to—well, it is not polite to say where—and William succeeded in dragging England into a war with France. England had nothing to gain in that war, and gained nothing but defeat.
William himself took the command. In person William III. was thin, pale, dyspeptic and unwholesome, which accounts for his bad temper. He was brave and obstinate, and no series of defeats could take the conceit out of him. A good statesman, he was a bad general: it has even been said of him that he lost more battles than any other commander in history. He was now opposed in the field by a genius of high order, François de Montmorenci, Duke of Luxembourg, Marshal of France. Luxembourg like Marlborough had learnt the art of war under Condé and Turenne and would have equalled those leaders, if he had had their bodily vigor; but he was a ricketty hunchback.
The first encounter at which Berwick was present, between those two valetudinary warriors who ought both have been at home with their feet in warm water, was at Steinkerk where William came near scrambling a victory by a stratagem. He had seized one of Luxembourg’s spies and had forced him to write false intelligence to him. Luxembourg was deceived, and before he knew it the English were upon him; but so promptly did he throw his troops into order of battle that after an engagement which was surpassed in bloody obstinacy only by the one that followed, the victory remained to him.
The next year these two generals met at Landen or Neerwinden. The battle takes both names from two towns held by the English at the beginning of it. Landen, says Macaulay, was the most terrible battle of the seventeenth century. Berwick says he himself was chosen by Luxembourg to open the ball. At the head of four battalions he marched upon Neerwinden. He forced the English lines and drove them back into the town. But they rallied; Berwick’s four battalions were broken up, and he was left almost alone. He tore the trappings off his uniform, and by speaking English hoped to pass for an English officer till he could escape. But he was recognized, and gave up his sword to one of his Churchill uncles a brother of Marlborough.
The awful carnage of this awful battle then centered around Neerwinden. The French were repulsed time and again. At last the household troops of King Louis were brought up to the attack. At their head was the king’s nephew Philip duke of Chartres, afterwards duke of Orleans, afterwards Regent of France. These soldiers had turned the tide at Steinkerk, and now once more they maintained their high reputation: The English were driven out.
Macaulay says:—“At Landen two poor, sickly beings were the soul of two great armies. It is probable that among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers marshalled around Neerwinden, the two feeblist in body were the hunchback dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England.”
Quite picturesque, that! but the truth is William covered no retreat slow or fast: he covered nothing but his horse and to him he applied both spurs: it was the best he could do.
Before he fled William had summoned his cousin Berwick before him. He told him he should send him to England to be tried for high-treason—He, a born Englishman in arms against his native country! This purpose was quite worthy of the signer of the warrant for the massacre of Glencoe; but it was frustrated as follows:
In the list of prisoners to be exchanged on both sides, Luxembourg observed that the name of Berwick was wanting. He learned for what fate he was reserved; he seized the duke of Ormond one of his own prisoners, and sent William word that whatever measure was meted out to Berwick, should be measured again to Ormond. Ormond was a favorite of William, and Berwick was exchanged for him.[2]
In all this dreadful fighting the best soldier in Europe remains nearly inactive; not that he was sulky like our old friend Achilles; but his sovereign feared and hated him, and was reluctant to employ him. It is true that William had sent Marlborough into Ireland to quell the Irish who were fighting the Saxon whenever there was Saxon there to fight, and when there was none, were fighting each other for the mere love of the sport. It was a task that had already baffled William and his Dutch generals, and which perhaps he hoped would baffle Marlborough; but John Churchill was not born to be baffled. He knocked the heads together so smartly of Pat and Mike that those gentlemen made up their minds to be aisy; and he finished his errand so promptly that William himself felt bound to say that considering my lord Marlborough had seen so little of war, he had done very well.
In 1702, William was returning one day from a ride which he was taking for his dyspepsia, when his horse slipped and fell. The jolt shook out of him what little of life he had left; and Anne succeeded to the throne. Mary had died some years before. The day of Marlborough was now come. The theatre of his glory and chiefly that of Berwick’s, was the war of the Spanish succession.
Charles II. of Spain was the fifth of the Spanish Hapsburgs; he was also the fifth in descent from the great emperor Charles V. who was Charles I. of Spain. Charles II. having no children, the next heir was the dauphin of France, son of Louis XIV. and of Maria Teresa the oldest sister of Charles; but in order to prevent the two crowns from falling upon one head, the dauphin assigned his right to his second son Philip. The other claimants were the archduke Charles afterwards Emperor, and a young prince of the house of Bavaria, both grand-children of younger sisters of Maria. The Bourbon claim was therefore the best.
English historians lay great stress upon the fact that Louis and Maria at their marriage, formally renounced all claim to the crown of Spain both for themselves and their posterity; but those historians take care not to tell the whole story. The renunciation in question was not a compact with England or with the Empire: it was a compact with Spain alone; and if Spain chose to waive it, it was nobody else’s business. To avoid war however Louis and the Emperor agreed to withdraw their claim, and leave it to the little Bavarian; but just then that prince in an untimely manner died. Soon after his demise, the king of Spain died after having, at the request of his nobles and by the advice of the pope, made a will bequeathing the crown to the legitimate heir, the house of Bourbon. It is noteworthy that the dying king was a Hapsburg, and had expressed his preference for a Hapsburg successor; but the pope who was also moribund warned him not to die with the sin upon his conscience of having diverted the succession from the lawful channel. Where did the renunciation stand in the opinion of these two potentates?
Philip of Bourbon now king of Spain entered Madrid accompanied by his wife and a singular personage whom Louis had sent with them. This was the Princess of Orsini of the house of La Trémoille in France, and widow of the duke of Bracciano, prince of Orsini in Italy. She ruled Philip, ruled his wife, ruled Spain, and was an indispensable agent there of Louis XIV.
The Spaniards received Philip with open arms; but war was none the less declared by the Empire, England and Holland for the purpose of driving Philip out and putting the archduke in his place, which would have been nearly to reëstablish the empire of Charles-the-Fifth. But the English thought of nothing but of fighting the French, and of taking revenge for Steinkerk and Landen.
Marlborough took command of the English and Dutch. The Emperor’s troops were led by another great soldier, the Prince Eugene. I have already alluded to a pretty Italian girl, Olympia Mancini niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who won the heart of Louis XIV. in his youth, and was prevented by her uncle from marrying him. She got over that disappointment by which she missed being queen of France, and married the Count of Soissons of the house of Savoy, and gave birth at Paris to the Prince Eugene. He was educated for the Church; but he resolved to be a soldier and applied to the king for a commission. Louis told him to go back to his beads and his breviary; so he offered his services to the Emperor, and spent his life fighting alternately against the Turks and against his own countrymen. It was he who two years after the close of the war, commanded the imperial forces at Petervaradin, and struck the first irreparable blow to the Ottoman power.
I cannot follow the brilliant career of those two captains. Brilliant as it was however, it came to nought, and chiefly by the soldiership which the duke of Berwick displayed in Spain itself. The English had landed an army there to which was added a contingent of Portuguese. Louis sent Berwick to oppose them with what few troops he could spare. It was now that Berwick showed himself to be a past master of defensive warfare—a true Fabius. The English, superior in numbers, could advance nowhere against this adroit and sleepless adversary. He relates that on one occasion the enemy who had long tried to cross a river, posted themselves at last on a tongue of land formed by a sharp bend in the stream, so they could attempt the passage either at the right or the left. This reduced him to the dangerous necessity of dividing his forces so as to defend both fords. An accident of the ground saved him. The bank on his side, was an interrupted series of bluffs which half the time hid his men from the enemy. He kept transferring them from one ford to the other, making them form ranks and march slowly when visible, and run helter skelter when out of sight. The English who kept counting the same men twice, did not risk the crossing.
While thus disputing the passage of the river, Berwick received an order from King Philip to return to Madrid in order to defend that capital. He replied that the true place to defend Madrid, was on the banks of that stream, and he refused to quit. Afterwards when the English had retired, he learnt that Philip and his queen had sent such a remonstrance to their grandfather that he had recalled him, and sent the Marshal de Tessin to take his place. Tessin was a friend of Berwick, and he asked Philip and his wife how they could make up their minds to spare so able a soldier. They were silent; there was a pause; at last the queen broke out with:—What can we do with a great, lank devil of an Englishman who will have his own way?
Berwick reported himself at Versailles. Louis asked him why Philip had demanded his recall. Has he made any charges against me, inquired the duke. None whatever replied the king. Then said Berwick I have nothing to say.
During his absence everything went wrong. Madrid was taken by the Imperialists, and the archduke crowned with the title of Charles III. and Spain enjoyed the advantage of two kings at a time: a Hapsburg at one end of the land, and a Bourbon at the other.
In this confused state of things Louis sent Berwick back, having first conferred upon him the rank of Marshal of France so that Philip might treat him with more respect. Inferior in force he was obliged to resort to the same defensive tactics which had succeeded before. At the same time he implored Louis to send him more troops, pleading that any unforeseen accident might be the loss of Spain. The king, hard pressed as he was by Marlborough and Eugene, contrived to send him a few more regiments, and now for the first time he found himself equal to the enemy.
The decisive encounter took place at Almanza. This battle is unique among battles in that a Frenchman commanded the English, and an Englishman the French. The general of the English was the ex-count of Ruvigny a Huguenot who had been driven from France by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He had been created Earl of Galway in Ireland. He was a good soldier and was now fighting with bitter animosity against the king who had persecuted him.
But to the battle. Berwick led his own right wing. He threw into some disorder the English left; then instead of following up his advantage in that direction, he wheeled suddenly to the left, fell upon the enemy’s centre and crushed it. The victory was complete. An English account says that out of the thirty thousand men which Galway led into the field, seventeen thousand either fell or were taken prisoner; and that they lost all their artillery and baggage.
Philip was restored to his throne. He now sought to make amends to the devil of an Englishman who would have his own way, by creating him duke of Liria and Xerica with ample estates. Berwick refused them for himself, but accepted them for his son who thus became a Spanish grandee. Philip also offered, if Berwick would leave the service of his grandfather and enter his, to make him generalissimo of all Spain. He answered that Louis XIV. was his best friend, and that he would never serve any other monarch.
Berwick returned to France and joined the army of the duke of Vendôme who was another of his cousins. Vendôme was grandson and Berwick great-grandson of Henry IV. They were unlike however: Berwick was without vices; Vendôme was drunken and debauched. He was a good general nevertheless, and the year before had kept at bay Marlborough and Eugene during a whole campaign. Now he listened to a council of officers, and, Berwick dissenting, risked Oudenarde and was beaten. The next year Louis sent Berwick to the frontier of Savoy, to practise his old game of making one battalion appear two to the enemy; and to keep in check an army which threatened to invade France.
The English landed another army in Spain under General Stanhope, and the Emperor one under Count Staremberg. Philip called loudly for Berwick, but Louis could not spare him: he was holding the wolf by the ears and it would not do to call him off.
Macaulay says the fate of Spain was decided at Almanza: that that was a disaster Marlborough and Eugene could hardly have repaired, much less Stanhope and Staremberg. To oppose those two captains, Louis sent Vendôme. Vendôme had contracted the habit of getting sober whenever great issues were at stake, and he was in that abnormal state on the present occasion. By a dexterous movement he caught Stanhope napping at Brihuaga, and simply bagged him and his army. He then turned upon Staremberg. The encounter took place at Villa-Viciosa where the Imperialists after a stout resistance, withdrew leaving the victory to the French. This battle rid Philip of foreign enemies, and the crown sat steady on his head; and it still sits on the head of his descendant.
Villa-Viciosa was Vendôme’s last fight: the sober fit proved fatal; he died in Spain soon after the battle. Philip who was his cousin one degree further removed than Berwick, caused his remains to be laid in the royal sepulchre of the Escurial, and they repose there still.
A change of ministry at this time in England, led to one of those acts that have purchased for her the name of Perfidious Albion. Legend says a glass of water did it. Sarah duchess of Marlborough was mistress of the household of Queen Anne. The two ladies were so affectionate that they gave each other pet names: Anne was Mrs. Morley, Sarah was Mrs. Freeman, and the more affectionate they grew the more they quarrelled. One day during a skirmish, Mrs. Morley asked Mrs. Freeman to bring her a glass of water. She obeyed, but instead of presenting it with proper grace, she pushed the salver into the queen’s face and upset the glass in her lap. The queen ordered her to quit her presence, and directly sent and demanded of her the gold key which was her emblem of office.
Now this is all true except perhaps the glass of water. It is true that a quarrel with the duchess did determine Anne to abandon Marlborough and the Whigs and go over to Bolingbroke and the Tories. Marlborough was recalled from his command, and the allies left to shift for themselves, with the aid however of the English and Dutch contingents which remained to them under the Duke of Albemarle who, in the absence of Eugene, was in chief command. Albemarle was an Englishman that William had made out of a Dutchman named Yost Van Keppel. William himself had taught him the art of war and he was a bad general; Villars who commanded the French, was a good one, and the battle of Denain ended in accordance with those conditions.
It was the last of the war. The peace of Utrecht was signed to which England acceded, abandoning all she had fought for.
The queen of Spain died, and as there was no fighting for Berwick to do, Louis sent him with a message of condolence for Philip. But peaceful embassies were not for the like of him: he never reached Madrid. An envoy from Philip stopped him on the way and informed him that Barcelona had revolted, and that it was for him to go there and restore order. He flew thither and laid siege to the town. Discovering that the citizens were receiving aid from Majorca he ordered the Spanish fleet to blockade the port, and having made a breach with his cannon he led his men to the assault. They had fought their way to the middle of the town when the garrison offered to surrender. The point then was to save the town from pillage and from those awful scenes which occur when a city is taken by storm. He directed the commander of the garrison not to let his surrender be known, and still to man the barricades. He then ordered a retreat, on the pretence that it was night-fall, and that they must prepare for a more vigorous attack on the morrow. The next morning Barcelona was peacefully theirs. He says it was the first town taken by assault that ever escaped pillage, and in his pious way he attributes it to the grace of God, and says that human skill alone could not have compassed it.
During the siege Philip to lose no time, had wooed and won another bride, Elizabeth Farnese daughter of the duke of Parma; and Berwick received one day an order from the king to send the fleet to Genoa to fetch the new queen. He replied that the blockade of the port was essential to the capture of the place, and that not a ship could be spared. The great, lank devil of an Englishman had not improved, and Philip and Elizabeth had to wait.
The name Farnese brings up another family which stands out in relief in the tableau of history. You have all been to Rome. You remember in the church of Saint Peter, near the chair in which Peter himself sat when he was pope, a sepulchral monument the finest in the church. It is that of Alexander Farnese, Paul III. Near the banks of the Tiber you remember that vast edifice the Palace Farnese, and on the other side of the river the Farnesina, or little Farnese. You remember the Farnese gardens where they have dug out the foundations of the palace of the Caesars. All these demesnes, except the monument, belonged till recently to the kings of Naples descendants of Philip and Elizabeth.
It was the princess of Orsini herself who had chosen a scion of that famous race for Philip’s second wife; and the princess did not fail to repent of it. She had been deceived by one of the greatest scamps in Europe, the Cardinal Alberoni who had assured her that Elizabeth Farnese was a placid little maiden who would show her all the deference the late queen had shown.
Kings, you know, don’t get married like common folks: they don’t do their own courting nor even their own marrying: they send. A deputy woos the maiden by power of attorney. He puts the ring on her finger; the priest pronounces them man and wife; and then she is the spouse not of that man but of another one whom she has never seen. Etiquette then requires not that the bridegroom go forth to meet the bride, but that she come to him. But mark the often result:—Henry VIII. married Anne of Cleves on the faith of a portrait by Holbein which flattered her. She was brought to England. When Henry came to lay eyes on her he swore they had sent him a big Flanders mare. George IV. while Regent married Caroline of Brunswick. He sent Harris Earl of Malmsbury to stand in his place at the altar, and to bring her to England. Malmsbury in his memoirs, says he foresaw trouble from the beginning. The princess was good looking and good tempered, but her want of personal neatness was beyond belief. When he presented her to the Regent she kneeled. He raised her up and kissed her; and then turning to Malmsbury, whispered: Harris for God’s sake get me some brandy!
Barcelona taken, Berwick sent the fleet to Genoa, and Elizabeth was brought to Spain. As she approached Madrid, Philip and the Princess of Orsini went out together to meet her. She greeted her husband with marks of affection, but looked askance at his companion. Not long after, the Princess was suddenly seized, thrown into a carriage, and conveyed to the French frontier and dismissed with the injunction never again to set foot in Spain. Louis XIV. was incensed at this treatment of his faithful agent; but that Farnese girl was no subject of his, and she snapped her fingers at him.
Philip and Elizabeth managed to live together; but whenever he desired to say his soul was his own, he took care to say it privately to his confessor. Alberoni was rewarded by being made prime minister of Spain.
In 1715 Louis XIV. died after the longest reign in history. He was king at five and died at seventy-seven. He outlived his oldest son and his oldest grandson and was succeeded by his great-grandson Louis XV. another boy of five.
Louis had made a will leaving in effect the regency during the minority, to the Duke du Maine his son by Madame de Montespan and the best beloved of his children; but Du Maine was immediately confronted by a spirit more potent than his own, in the person of Philip of Orleans, Louis’ nephew, a prince whom Louis had feared more than he had loved. It was this Philip who had led the household troops at Neerwinden. He had married Du Maine’s sister, but he pushed him aside and seized the regency as his birthright. Though his private morals were deplorable he governed France with vigor and ability till the majority of Louis XV.
This change of rulers worked no prejudice to Berwick. The Regent Philip offered him the government of Guienne one of the finest of the provinces; and he accepted it. When the patent was made out, he was surprised to find it made to Du Maine under whom he was to act as lieutenant. He refused to do so. The Regent sent for him and explained to him how necessary he found it to flatter and conciliate his brother Du Maine. My Lord Duke, said Berwick, nobody knows better than I the difference between a genuine prince of the blood like you, and a spurious one like myself and like Du Maine; and I will not take civil service under one of the latter sort. Philip knew what an obstinate fellow he was dealing with, and he yielded. The patent was made out direct to Berwick.
One would think that Philip V. owing his crown to his French relations, would have kept at peace with them; and he would have done so but for that Farnese creature. He and the Regent fell into a dispute and then into a quarrel and then into hostile array; and Berwick took the field. In the Spanish army was his son the duke of Liria, and it might happen that father and son should meet face to face in battle. Berwick wrote to his son to sink all filial regard for him, and to serve his king as if he were a born Spaniard. The two Philips however became reconciled before much mischief was done.
In 1716 Marlborough died. The British idea seems to be that his career of victory did not end at that sad event. In the Tower of London some years ago, I was shown a cannon which the warden who spoke by the authority of the three kingdoms, declared was taken by Marlborough at the battle of Dettingen. When I let fall a timid doubt, he repeated the statement with an indignant emphasis which silenced cavil. History does indeed record one other case of the sort. You remember at Rome, near the Cloaca Maxima, a spring where women were washing. It is there that Castor and Pollux watered their horses after the battle of Lake Regillus. Those two warriors had already been dead many years, and placed in the firmament where we still behold them.
Eugene had retired from active life, and Berwick now shared with Villars the reputation of being the foremost of living generals. The war of the Polish succession came in the following manner:—Early in the eighteenth century Charles XII. of Sweden—that name at which Doctor Johnson said the world grew pale—burst into central Europe and turned everything upside down. He drove Augustus-the-strong from the throne of Poland, and put in his place Stanislas Leczinski; not that he thought Stanislas a better man than Augustus, it was merely his propensity to upset things. But he tried to upset one man who was too square-built for him; and that was Peter Romanoff, Peter-the-great. Peter beat him at Pultowa, and put things back in their places. Stanislas, driven from the throne upon which he had been so suddenly set, fled to Wissenbourg in Alsace, and was living there with his wife and daughter Maria on a small pension granted by the French court. They were poor but pious, and morning and evening they knelt and thanked God that although they no longer had a throne to sit upon, they still had a roof over their heads.
One day there was a knock at the door; a stately official entered and bowing to the floor, gave Stanislas a letter. It was a portentous missive, a foot square and sealed with half a pound of wax. What was it? Were they troublesome at Wissenbourg? Was it a mandate to quit? Where should they go? Mother and daughter gathered at the side of the father as he opened it. It was a despatch from the duke of Bourbon prime minister of France, asking the hand of Maria for the young king.
Louis XV. and Maria Leczinska were soon married; and a few years later Louis undertook to restore his father-in-law to the Polish throne. Villars and Berwick took command of the French armies; but the crown of Poland was not recovered. The Emperor and Louis compromised the matter by the former giving to Stanislas the duchy of Lorraine a fief of the Empire; and that is the way Lorraine became French.
Peace was not the normal state of things between France and the Empire; and Villars and Berwick were not long permitted to be idle. In 1734 as Berwick was reconnoitring the enemy’s position at Philipsbourg, he was struck by a cannon ball and instantly killed. This was that second wound which he does not mention in his autobiography. His death was similar to that of Turenne who had fallen sixty years before at Salsbach.
Berwick was in his sixty-fifth year. Villars who was eighty-two, only lived long enough to learn the death of his brother in arms. Berwick said he, has always been lucky; and now he has died as a soldier would wish to die.
Bolingbroke who was associated with Berwick in furthering the pretentions of his half brother James III., says that the duke of Berwick was the best great man he ever knew.
He was twice married. Both of his wives were Irish: the first was the daughter of the earl of Clanricarde; the second the daughter of a gentleman who had married one of the maids of honor of Queen Mary Beatrice. In his memoirs Berwick despatches his two wives in just ten lines, five to each. He does not even tell us their christian names. He was too busy fighting to think of the women.
He had an own brother, the offspring like himself, of James II. and Arabella Churchill, and bearing like him the surname of Fitzjames. This brother also rose to distinction: he took to the church and became bishop of Soissons. It was he who stood at the bedside of Louis XV. when the king was supposed to be dying, and refused him absolution and extreme unction till he would dismiss his favorite, Madame de Chateauroux. The king yielded; the favorite was sent away, and he was absolved and anointed for Heaven; but
The king recovered and recalled Madame de Chateauroux.
Some time after my return from Europe in 1874, I read in the New York World a notice of the marriage in Paris of a Spanish nobleman with a Miss Stuart who the account said was a descendant of the duke of Berwick and of James II. It was added that the bride’s family were once known as the Fitzjameses, but that they had subsequently taken the name of Stuart as more indicative of their royal extraction.
So it seems the Berwick branch of the Churchills was extant twenty years ago, and we hope is extant still, though its existence may not be known to Lord Alfred.
PETRARCH who lived in the fourteenth century, gave the name of the Captivity of Babylon to the condition of the Church of Rome which was then in exile. No longer on the banks of the Tiber she held her seat, but on the banks of the Rhone; and Avignon not Rome was the assumed mistress of the world. Petrarch did not live to see the end, but in one respect the appellation was a prophecy: the Captivity lasted seventy-two years; and the name is often applied to that period, especially by Roman Catholic historians.
I shall endeavor to trace some of the causes of that singular revolution, and some of its results.
Towards the close of the thirteenth century, a poor hermit named Pietro da Morrone who had starved himself into the highest state of sanctity, was raised to the Apostolic throne with the title of Celestin V. One of the qualities which at that time recommended a candidate for the papacy, was that he should be moribund, that his days should be numbered; and this explains the rapidity with which the popes succeeded one another. During one year of that century, the year 1276, four successive pontiffs reigned.
Celestin V. knew nothing of the world nor of business; and it was thought that the cares of his high office, would soon finish him. But his anchorite life had agreed with his constitution; his diet of parched peas and pure water had left him with a sound digestion; and he showed no readiness to depart this life so that somebody else might be pope. It was necessary to hasten matters. How this was done is uncertain; but it is said that one of his cardinals scared the poor old hermit off his throne by telling him of imaginary plots for his assassination. Celestin abdicated, and the scaring cardinal, Benedetto Gaetano usurped his seat as Boniface VIII.; and when this lofty prelate rode to the Lateran, mother of churches, to celebrate his accession, two kings, James of Sicily and Andrew of Hungary walked like grooms at his horse’s head, and then waited on him at the table like common domestics. A pope in those days was a demi-god.
The Church at that time interfered with all the affairs of life. If a man had to sustain the validity of his father’s will or of his own marriage, he had to do it before ecclesiastical tribunals. If he died intestate the Church administered on his property. Even the calendar was ecclesiastical, and the year began not on the first of January or the first of any other month, but at Easter; so that portions of March and April belonged now to the old year and now to the new. In fine, canon, that is church law was the only law.
In contrast to this, was the trifling physical force the pontiffs could exercise. The States of the Church were small in extent; the battallions they could put in the field were few in number; and from time to time some impious prince instigated by the devil, would snap his fingers at this ghostly puissance; and then the world would be startled at the disparity between the real and the pretended power of Rome. But it was like a glimpse of the landscape a dark night by a flash of lightning: it hardly served as a land-mark; pope and prince would come to an understanding, and the spell remain unbroken.
Boniface who was perhaps the haughtiest of the successors of Saint Peter, was soon made to feel this instability. Albert son of Rudolph of Hapsburg, was elected to succeed his father on the imperial throne. Boniface was not satisfied. What did he know about these Hapsburgs? They were new, parvenu, and one was enough. He put forth a bull commanding Albert on pain of excommunication, to deliver up the imperial crown to Adolfus of Nassau.
A papal bull is a roll of parchment on which are inscribed in latin the behests of the pontiff, and to which is suspended by a ribbon, a globular leaden seal. It is this seal which gives it the name of bull, from the latin bulla, whence is also derived our word bowl.
Albert of Hapsburg had a priest read to him the document, for he could not read it himself, and after pondering, resolved to do differently—that is differently from what the bull required. He tied the parchment to his horse’s tail, and in that guise rode into the battle of Spires where he slew with his own right hand, his rival Adolfus of Nassau.
Boniface after some bitter moments of reflection, did the wisest thing possible. He rescinded the bull and received Albert back into the bosom of the church. Indeed the return of the prodigal son was so welcome that some years later Boniface issued another bull giving to Albert the kingdom of France, without however showing him how he was to get it.
The power of the papacy had culminated in the hundred years between Innocent III. and Boniface VIII., and was now on the decline. To this downward tendency Boniface shut his eyes; but we can assure ourselves of that tendency by considering the different success of those two pontiffs Innocent at the beginning of the thirteenth century and Boniface at the end, in dealing with two able kings of France.
Philip II. called Philip Augustus, the rival of the English Richard-the-lion-hearted, was the cotemporary of Innocent III. Philip had married a Danish princess named Ingerburge. The chronicles say she was young and handsome; but Philip fell none the less in love with Agnes de Méranie the daughter of a Flemish nobleman.
He applied to the pope for a divorce so that he might marry Agnes. Innocent refused. Philip then took the matter into his own hands and decreed his own divorce. Innocent excommunicated him and laid his kingdom under interdict.
A dreadful word that of Interdict! No churches open, no bells rung, no mass, no confession, no marriages, no funerals, no religious rites whatever except baptism and extreme unction—the ushering in and the ushering out of life.
This deprivation settled down like a pall upon that ignorant and superstitious age, and the people would not endure it. They revolted and Philip succumbed: he sent away the beloved Agnes and took back the hated Ingerburge. Such was the fortune of Philip Augustus in measuring himself against the Church. We shall now see how his descendant another Philip, sped, a century later, in a contest with the same power. Philip IV. called Philip-the-fair, Philip-the-handsome, was grandson of Louis IX., Saint Louis, the Marcus Aurelius of the middle ages. Philip had inherited all the talents and none of the virtues of his grandfather: he was true to no obligation and troubled with no scruples. Boniface had become aware of the dangerous character of the French king, and he sought to propitiate him by canonising his grandfather who thus escaped from purgatory and became a saint in Heaven; and no king ever deserved the promotion better. But Philip was not to be bought by so unsubstantial a favor: he was much less sentimental than rapacious and he seized the papal revenues. The clergy from time immemorial had paid to the Holy See tithes and first fruits. Philip being in need of money, ordered that those stipends be paid to him, promising to account for them to Boniface. The pope rejected the arrangement with just indignation. High words followed, and he issued the bull Clericos laicos, forbidding the clergy in France and elsewhere to pay any taxes to the State, and commanding them to pour all their contributions directly into the Apostolic treasury. Philip resisted. Edward I. of England did the same; but Boniface did not take the same measures against Edward, that he did against Philip. Perhaps he feared the vigor and capacity of the English king, unconscious that the man he was defying was at least as able, and was the less scrupulous of the two.
Philip not only forbade his clergy to pay tithes and other taxes to the pope, but he prohibited the export of money from the kingdom for any purpose whatsoever. Boniface retaliated by excommunicating Philip and laying France under interdict. At the same time he declared that the kings of the earth were subject to him in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. None of his predecessors had gone so far: not Gregory VII., not Innocent III. had risked so dangerous a piece of arrogance; and it proved the ruin of Boniface. Philip was too sagacious not to see the advantage this false step gave him. His kingdom under the ban of the Church, himself excommunicate, he resolved to make common cause with that people who, in a more benighted age, had fallen away from his ancestor. He convoked the States-General; and this is the first time that famous assembly was called together.
The States-General were the general estates, that is all the estates of the nation. They consisted of four elements: the crown, the nobility, the clergy and the common people. It is customary however to name only the last three. To Philip is also due the reorganisation of the French parliaments into the form they retained down to the revolution. The parliaments were at first the occasional conferences of the sovereign with his nobles; then they grew into some degree of permanence, and combined judicial functions with political. When Philip introduced the States-General, he deprived the parliaments of their legislative functions, and constituted them courts of law civil and criminal. To them however, and especially to the parliament of Paris, was left the prerogative of registering the royal edicts. This registry at first was solely to publish them; but it grew into a usage indispensable to their validity, and thus became a check upon the executive; so that the monarchy of the old régime was not quite an absolute one.
These first States-General met in the Church of Notre Dame; and the third estate, that is the common people, filled nearly half the building. The towns only were represented: they had become too wealthy to be longer overlooked. The country people came in at a later day.
Philip laid before this assembly two documents: one that the pope had discharged at him; the other a copy of the one he had flung back at the pope. They are so short and spirited that I venture to insert them: “Boniface, bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Philip king of the Franks. Fear God and keep his commandments. Know that thou art subject to us as well in the temporal as in the spiritual; that the collation of benefices and prebends belongs not to thee; that if thou guardest the vacant benefices, it is to reserve the fruits for the successors; that if thou conferrest them upon any body, we declare the collation void; and we revoke it if executed, pronouncing all those who think otherwise heretics.”
To him the King:—“Philip by the grace of God, king of the French, to Boniface who calls himself Pope, little or no salutation. May thy great fatuity know that we are subject to nobody for the temporal; that the collation of churches and prebends belongs to us by our royal right; that the fruits thereof are ours; that the collations made by us are valid; that we will maintain their possessors with all our power; and that we pronounce those who think otherwise fools and madmen.”
It is just to say that the authenticity of the missive of Boniface, is disputed, though Hallam considers it genuine. It set forth nothing more than the pope had already avowed. At all events it put the case clearly before the assembly. A committee of the Third Estate, after much pondering, came and knelt before the throne in the middle of the church, and rendered the following verdict in which you will observe they had caught the tone of their master:—“It is an abomination that Boniface like the blackguard that he is should interpret so ill the words of Scripture: what thou shall bind on earth, shall be bound in Heaven; as if it meant that if he put a man in prison in this world, God would put him in prison in the next.” Philip had this profound state paper turned into latin, and sent to the pope; and this document as well as Philip’s missive, is still in the archives of the Vatican.
The clergy alone hesitated to stand by the king. They asked time to deliberate. Philip would allow them not an hour. You are Frenchmen, cried he; from whom do you hold your benefices, from me your king, or from the Neapolitan Benedetto. They answered: from the king. They then begged leave to send a deputation to Rome to explain matters; and Philip refused. As for the excommunication and interdict, the king ordered them burnt by the common hangman; and woe to the priest who dared shut his church, or tie up his bell-rope, or stop marrying or confessing or saying mass! The days of Philip-the-handsome were not the days of Philip-the-august.
This triumph at home might well have satisfied Philip; but he still followed up Boniface in his own domain with pitiless energy. He accused him not only of having defrauded Celestin of his throne, but of having poisoned him, and what was still worse, of heresy; and he sent orders to his agent in Italy, William of Nogaret, to seize his sacred person.
Nogaret in conjunction with Sciarra Colonna the chief of the Ghibbeline faction, gathered together a few soldiers and surprised Boniface at his residence at Agnani. The pontiff supposed they intended to kill him. He put the dalmatica on his shoulders and the crown on his head, and sat like Papirius awaiting the blow. Colonna cried out to him to abdicate, as he had driven Celestin to abdicate. Betrayed like Jesus Christ, replied the old man, I will die his vicar![3]
But it was not their purpose to put him to death: no such merciful end was to be his. They held him three days a prisoner, treating him with a mockery of respect; and then the populace of Agnani, perceiving that the Ghibbelines were but a handful, rose and delivered him from his captors. But the unexampled outrage had overthrown his reason, and he died a maniac. The terrible Philip had hounded his enemy into his grave; but even there he did not leave him in peace, as we shall see.
The bishop of Ostia was chosen pope with the name of Benedict XI. Philip demanded that the bull of excommunication be annulled, and himself restored to full communion with the Church. Benedict complied; and thus was completed this first triumph of the temporal over the spiritual. Philip still claimed to be a true son of the Church; but he had shaken off her authority and he now proceeded to put his foot on her neck. It is to this degenerate grandson of a sainted king, that the Church of Rome owes that day of humiliation which forms the title of this paper.
Benedict XI. was as moribund as usage required; and in less than a year he laid down his pontificate and his life together. There now dawned upon Philip a scheme no less bold and sacriligious than that of owning and possessing both pope and papacy. He interfered to prevent an election till his own man could come to the fore; and for more than a year the Church was without a head. Then having by bribery and intimidation, obtained control of the sacred college, he made them choose Bertrand de Goth, bishop of Bordeaux, who took the name of Clement V. Popes, you observe, change their names when they put on the tiara. This custom though ancient has not always existed: Saint Peter for example did not change his.[4]
There was a secret bargain between Clement and Philip by which the former was to pay the price of his elevation. There is discussion whether it related to the removal of the Holy See or to the destruction of the Templars. As Philip needed the pope’s aid in both these enormities which have cast such a lurid glory or glare on his reign, perhaps he bargained for both.
Clement V. after having been crowned at Lyons, established his seat at Avignon on the left bank of the Rhone, and thus began the Captivity. As it was followed by the Great Schism or Schism of the West, more than a century was to pass before the Church, always called Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, was to be wholly reinstated in the Eternal City.
Philip’s old enemy had died demented, and in that collapse of intellect, the last rites of the Church either had not been administered or had proved fruitless. He had gone where Hamlet’s father went, unhouseled unaneled, till his sins could be burned and purged away; and a smart anathema in due form from that Church which rules the dead and the living, might send him prone to the pit. Boniface had canonised Philip’s grandfather, and that soul in purgatory had thus become a saint in Heaven; and now Philip was invoking a rescript of different import, to despatch his grandfather’s benefactor in the other direction. Such are the possible vicissitudes of another life.
Philip instituted regular proceedings against the dead pope, accusing him of every manner of impiety and wickedness, and Clement was forced to give ear to it, but though Philip’s creature, he remembered the throne he sat upon, and was loath to dishonor it by blasting the memory of one of his predecessors; so he gained time: he heard testimony and took counsel; and then he heard more testimony and took more counsel. He whispered to Philip that if Boniface was the unhallowed wretch they supposed, he was already damned, and they were losing their time; and Philip finally let the matter drop.
It were well for the memory of these two potentates if the attempt to dislodge Boniface from purgatory, were the greatest wrong they undertook. We now come to one of the foulest crimes in history: one in which the king was principal and the pope accessory.
In Paris, but in a quarter no longer fashionable and which therefore you have not visited, is a congeries of shops where everything is sold by the penny worth. It is called the Temple from the building that once stood there. In the last century it served as a prison. Louis XVI. was kept there before his execution. In London there is a Temple church; and we hear of lawyers of the middle and inner temple. All these sites take their name from having been occupied by the commanderies or convents of the Knights-Templar an order of fighting monks founded in the twelfth century at Jerusalem, to guard the Holy Sepulchre. As monks they made vows of chastity and poverty; as soldiers, never to decline combat at whatever odds. But as years rolled on they forgot one of their vows: they became rich and riches made them haughty without however letting down at all their soldierly discipline and valour. They were respected and feared throughout Europe. The head of the order called the Grand-master was, according to Voltaire, equal in dignity to a king. Their chief commandery was the one in Paris on the spot where needles are now sold by the paper, and thread by the skein; and it formed a kind of imperium in imperio little to the taste of Philip IV. But a still graver fault was their wealth. Philip had begun the quarrel with Boniface by pocketing his tithes, and he sought an issue of the same character with the knights. But in order to get their money it was necessary to destroy them, or at least to destroy their organisation: they were the best soldiers in France; and desperately would they defend their persons and their pockets if the chance were afforded them. So Philip used craft, the only weapon he wielded better than they. He invited the Grand-master, Jacques Molay, to be god-father to one of his children, and treated him as an equal. Never did the standing of the order seem higher.
Suddenly at the dead of night, a band of Philip’s ruffians in numbers to defy resistance, burst into the Temple, captured the knights and threw them into prison; and Clement issued a bull abolishing the order. But he was not allowed to stop there: Philip obliged him to appoint an ecclesiastical commission to try the Templars. He accused them of spitting upon the Cross, which was blasphemy, and of a still darker crime, one so dark that he could name it only in a whisper, namely baphometry. And what, you ask, is baphometry? The word had a dreadful sound. The people were horror-stricken when told that the knights were guilty of baphometry, and cried out away with them! Philip when asked to explain, crossed himself and said that baphometry was the worship of graven images, of horrid idols sculptured by the devil’s own hand; and he produced those idols in evidence; and those idols are still to be seen in European museums. Whether the devil was really the artist has not been ascertained; the idols themselves are hideous enough to justify the worst; but to the mere lay understanding they seem to be nothing more than odd and ugly bits of bric-a-brac which the knights may have kept as curiosities. They denied having committed either blasphemy or baphometry, and were put to torture. Some of them suffered in obdurate silence; others among whom was the Grand Master himself, to win a respite from torment, confessed having worshipped bric-a-brac. But a short relief brought back their fortitude: they retracted their confession and defied the tyrant. But it was all the same whether they confessed or denied: the putting in of the idols themselves as testimony was conclusive and the knights were condemned.
The Church of Rome has always professed great horror of shedding human blood; so the Templars were sentenced not to the block and the axe, but to the stake, and fifty-nine of them were burned alive near the gate of Saint Antoine: the rest were banished.
It is said that as the flames gathered around the Grand Master he summoned the pope to meet him at the bar of God in forty days, and the king in one year. They both came to time.
There is a mystery about the death of Philip. Some say his horse ran away with him hunting, and crushed him against a tree; others that when the year had rolled round, the spirit of Jacques Molay beckoned to him, and he came.
In point of talents, Philip-the-fair was one of the greatest of monarchs: the reconstruction of the parliaments, the States-General, the removal of the Holy See, the destruction of the Templars, were the work, good or bad, of no common head or hand.
Edward II. of England married Philip’s daughter, and Philip’s ability and rapacity seemed to descend less to his three sons who succeeded him one after the other on the throne of France, than to his English grandson Edward III.
Boniface in his last ravings, had cursed Philip and his progeny; and the sceptre soon departed from them. But Boniface being crazy, had failed to put the malediction in due canonical form; and Time took advantage of the irregularity to reverse it as follows:—All three of Philip’s sons left daughters only. The male line of Philip having thus run out, the Salic law came in play, and gave the crown to the son of Philip’s brother Charles of Valois. That son was Philip VI. But Philip-the-fair had married Jane queen of Navarre; and their eldest son Louis X. inherited both the crown of France and that of Navarre. After the death of Louis’s posthumous son who lived and reigned just five days, and won a niche in history as John the first, Navarre not being subject to the Salic law, fell to Louis’s daughter Jane who married the Count of Evreux. From that marriage was descended Jane d’Albret queen of Navarre who married a riotous scamp, Antony of Bourbon, descended in direct male line from the youngest son of Saint Louis. The son of Antony and Jane was Henry of Navarre, and while he was still young, the House of Valois having been extinguished by the assassination of Henry III., Henry of Navarre, Henry IV. became king of France. Thus did Time lay the curse of Boniface; but it took two centuries and a half to accomplish it.
If you will pardon further digression, I will say a word about those names Bourbon and Valois which you meet so often in history:—In spite of our notions about womens’ rights, we common folks are reconciled to see the wife take the name of the husband, even when we suspect that it is not he who is master of the house. Royalty has sometimes departed from this wholesome rule:—Robert of Clermont the youngest son of Louis IX., Saint Louis, married the heiress of the house of Bourbon. Instead of calling his wife Madame de Clermont, he called himself Monsieur de Bourbon; and they were the progenitors of the family which came to the throne in the person of Henry IV. Henry’s right to the crown of France, was through his father the riotous Antony, and to the crown of Navarre, through his mother Jane who was not riotous but pious.
Another way in which surnames have been acquired to the blood royal, is by the escheating of male fiefs to the crown by the extinction of male heirs. Thus the estates of Valois fell to the crown, and were bestowed by Philip III. on his second son Charles brother of Philip-the-fair. This Charles was the father of Philip VI. first king of the house of Valois.
Strictly speaking these poor kings had no family names at all—that is none in the sense that Smith and Brown are family names; and when Louis XVI. was arraigned before those cut-throats of the Convention, and called to answer to the name of Louis Capet, he refused, saying that his name was Louis of France. And in the archives of the Convention, is still to be found the inscription of a sum of francs expended to bury the Widow Capet. Widow Capet was Marie Antoinette, Mary of Lorraine, the descendant of Rudolph of Hapsburg, the daughter of a line of emperors, the wife of Louis of Bourbon, the queen of France. Widow Capet![5]
To return to the Captivity. On the death of Clement V. the cardinals made an effort to rescue the pontificate from French domination, and for two years there was no pope; but the French party prevailed, and the bishop of Fréjus was chosen who took the name of John XXII. He immediately confirmed the French ascendancy by appointing six new French cardinals. It was during his reign that began the quarrel between the Holy See and the Visconti a powerful Lombard family from which were descended the later Valois kings, and from which they derived their fatal claim to the Milanese. John XXII. not only excommunicated Matteo Visconti the head of the family, but he added an edict advertising him, his wife and children for sale as slaves. There were no bids, because the Visconti were pugnacious and would not have made good household servants. His son Marco beat the pope’s army at Vavrio on the Adda, and drove him back to France. But he came not bootless home like Bolingbroke. He had plundered Italy from end to end. Though he did not succeed in turning the Visconti into cash, there were found in his coffers after his death, twenty-five millions of florins in gold, in jewels and in plate.
The next pope was Jacques Fournier, Benedict XII. and the next, Pierre Roger, archbishop of Rouen, called Clement VI. The Holy See had now been thirty years without a home of its own. It had resided as tenant at Avignon, and paid rent to the Angevine Kings of Naples, called Angevine from their founder Charles of Anjou brother of Saint Louis. The Angevines were a disreputable set, and Queen Jane the heiress at that period, was not the best of them. Clement VI. bought Avignon of Jane for eighty thousand florins in gold which Voltaire says he never paid. He made it up to her however, by a transaction in his own line, to the understanding of which we must look a little into Jane’s qualities and conduct. She was married four times, and neither time did she make a good wife. Her first husband Andrew of Hungary, she strangled; her second, Louis of Tarento, she poisoned; her third, James of Aragon, perished nobody knows how; her fourth, Otho of Brunswick, prudently kept away from her. At last, her cousin Charles of Durazzo dethroned her, and served her as she had served her first husband—that is choked her, and that was the end of Jane. Before this last culmination, the pope had pardoned her sins. They were as scarlet, and he made them white like snow; and when you reflect that the catalogue embraced the assassination of at least two husbands, you will admit that according to any reasonable tariff, the pontiff did not remain her debtor.
It was during the reign of Clement VI. that the citizens of Rome, sick of misrule, revolted and created Nicholas Rienzi tribune of the people, and thus conjured up a ghost of the ancient republic. At Rome you are still shown the house of Rienzi.
Like the rest, Clement played with his thunderbolts. He excommunicated Waldemar king of Denmark for having made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land without his permission, which shows how hazardous it was in those days, to be pious on mere impulse and without due license from the Church.
Next came Innocent VI. and then Urban V. who was a Marseilles abbot. Urban undertook to be a great pope, but the Captivity was no time for great popes. Urban’s spiritual artillery seemed to have the same disagreeable property of recoil as that of our old friend Boniface VIII.
Petrarch then lived, and though he was a citizen of Avignon, he prayed night and morning for the rebuilding of the Roman pontificate. Listening to him, Urban went to Italy to recover if possible the patrimony of Saint Peter, or, if you insist, that of the Countess Matilda. He was confronted by that chronic enemy of the papacy, the Visconti. At that time the head of that house was one Bernabo who was if anything a little less bland in his way than his predecessors. After many high words, Urban lost his temper and let fly at Bernabo a major excommunication cursing him in eating and drinking and sleeping and in all the functions of life, and redoubling the anathema upon him wherever he might fetch up in the life to come. Bernabo seized the legate who brought the bull, and made him eat it—parchment, ribbon, leaden seal and all. What sauce was allowed him with this strange victual, and how he felt after supper, have not been handed down to us. Not content with that, the impious ruffian sent Urban word that it was he, Bernabo, who was pope in Italy, and emperor to boot; and that the Almighty himself dared do nothing there without his consent.
On Urban’s return to Avignon, a fresh humiliation awaited him. Peter-the-cruel king of Castile had an illegitimate brother, Henry of Trastamara who undertook to dethrone him. Henry obtained the aid of the famous French knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, and also of a band of mercenary soldiers called Free Companions who were not always distinguishable from free-booters. In their march toward Spain, they encamped one night on the bank of the Rhone opposite Avignon, and sent to the Holy Father praying that he would pardon their sins, bless their enterprise and give them some money. Urban granted them absolution and benediction; but he told them he had no money for them, and bid them be gone. They demanded forty thousand crowns in gold as the price of their departure. Urban launched at them a thunder-bolt as pregnant with disaster as the one he had discharged at Bernabo. Du Guesclin himself then sought an interview with his Holiness, and told him that he had no control over those marauders except on the field of battle, and that they were threatening to sack the papal palace. Urban, thoroughly frightened, recalled his curses and renewed his benedictions; but as his conscience would not allow him to take money out of the sacred treasury to give to such miscreants, he laid a tax on the citizens of Avignon, and they had to pay the sum demanded.
Gregory XI., nephew of Clement VI. was the next pope, and the last of the Captivity. He secured Avignon from being again put to ransom by the Free Companions by taking into his service a troop of them commanded by an Englishman named Sir John Hawkwood.
The Florentines had encroached upon the States of the Church; and Gregory, taking a leaf out of the book of John XXII., excommunicated them and advertised them for sale as slaves; but the Florentines proved to be no more merchantable than the Visconti.
Gregory went to Italy on the same errand as Urban V. and was no better received. He made however a solemn entry into Rome, and was on the point of being driven out, when he suddenly died there. Anybody may die suddenly in Rome; but trite as the event reads, Gregory’s not dying elsewhere brought about a state of things worse than the Captivity.
It was usage to hold the elective conclave in the town where the last pope had died, and the cardinals assembled in Rome. Out of the sixteen, eleven were Frenchmen. All the Avignon popes had been French either native or by adoption; and the conclave was on the point of choosing one more French pontiff when a Roman mob gathered around it and threatened, if the cardinals did not elect an Italian, to “make their heads redder than their hats”—that is to cut them off. Under this threat the cardinals chose the archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan who was not even a cardinal. He took the name of Urban VI. and fixed his seat at Rome.
As soon as the cardinals could levy Free-Companions enough to defend them from the rabble, they met at Agnani the place where Boniface had been seized by the ruffians of Philip, and repudiating the previous election as having been made under duress, chose one of their number, Robert of Geneva who succeeded to the throne of Avignon under the name of Clement VII. Thus began what is called the Great Schism or Schism of the West.
The Church has never questioned the authority of the Avignon popes of the Captivity, but she has stigmatised those of the Schism as antipopes. At that time however, at least half of the Roman Catholic world cleaved to them. To the see of Avignon adhered France, Spain, Scotland, Poland and Sicily; to the see of Rome, England, Germany and Flanders. The Italians now acknowledged and now rejected the rule of the Roman incumbent, as faction and civil strife swayed them.
On the death of Clement VII., the Avignon cardinals elected Peter de Luna one of their number, who assumed the name of Benedict XIII.
No point of doctrine separated the two pontificates; they were kept asunder by party spirit alone; and everybody began to be tired of the scandal. An effort was made on both sides to put an end to it. The disciples of Avignon extorted from Benedict a promise to abdicate which he did not keep. Those of the Roman obedience also revolted and appealed to the Council of Pisa which put forth an edict deposing both popes and electing a new one. The other two refused to lay down their respective tiaras; and then christians, and I fear sinners too, beheld the spectacle of three popes at once, each fulminating bulls of excommunication and anathema against his two rivals. The Council of Constance then tried its hand. It seized John XXIII. the Roman pontiff who had also promised to resign and had not kept his word, and put him in prison. This so dishonored the name John that no pope has assumed it since, though it was the favorite before. Faction however still prevailed, and the two conclaves persisted in making separate elections.
Avignon still disputed preëminence with Rome; but after Benedict XIII. the popes of the Schism do not seem to have resided there, and the Schism itself became apparently more or less vagrant and interrupted. Benedict’s successor a Spaniard named Munoz who called himself Clement VIII. sold out his interest in the triple crown for a bishopric; and the Schism slept. It was awakened again by the Council of Bàle which undertook to depose the Roman pontiff Eugenius IV., on a charge of heresy, and to set up in his place the strangest member of a strange family—that of Savoy. The feudal chiefs of that house had been known as Counts. Owing to their love of fighting and their success at it, the Emperor had created them Dukes; and a scion of that pugnacious race now reigns over Italy. Amadeus VIII. of Savoy, tired of fighting, turned monk. With a few of his nobles he withdrew to a monastery where the whole party made such progress in holiness, that the Council of Bale raised Amadeus to the papacy with the title of Felix V., and scattered bishoprics and other preferments among the rest. Eugenius mocked at the Council and refused to quit, and for nine years more the Church was convulsed by rival popes. Eugenius died clinging to the keys to the last; and the Savoyard, weary of supra-mundane elevation, went back to his monastery, leaving Nicholas V. who had succeeded Eugenius, sole head of the Church. The Schism of the West was at an end: it had lasted off and on within a year as long as the Captivity.
For more than a century, Avignon had been a seat of the papacy; and when it ceased to be so it was still hallowed ground: secular dominion would no longer take root there; and the Holy See remained in possession and governed it. The Eternal City herself had been a warning. During the paralysis of papal authority there, she had been a prey to anarchy. The Orsini, the Colonnas and a score of minor brigands had desolated her pleasant places, and decimated her people.
Avignon was not to be put to such a trial. The Church still governed and order reigned. It is true that sometimes when the French kings waxed recalcitrant, they would drive out the pope’s lieutenant and seize the town; but they always repented them of the evil, and gave back the sacred city unharmed.
At last one hundred years ago, those sans culottes of the revolution dissolved that charm as they did many another.
FROUDE in his history, calls the kings of Spain the house of Burgundy. They were properly Hapsburgs and of the eldest branch. At the same time they were descended from Mary of Burgundy; and it shows how deeply the career of her ducal ancestors had impressed itself on the mind of the historian, that he would fain continue the name beyond conventional usage.
There were but four of those dukes, and they flourished a century only; but they made changes which greatly moulded the polity of Europe. England whose history is our history, allowed herself to be drawn into the vortex. She allied herself with the House of Burgundy for the insane purpose of enabling the Plantagenets to transfer the seat of their empire from England to France, by which England would have been reduced to the condition of a province. She escaped that humiliation, but at the cost of her continental domain, the patrimony of Eleanor of Guienne wife of the first Plantagenet king, which comprised nearly one-third of France.
I propose to give some account of the foundation of that Second House of Burgundy. My authority is chiefly but not wholly Barante who takes for his motto: Scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum, and is none the less quoted by both English and French historians.
There were two Burgundies: the duchy still called Burgundy, and the county better known as La Franche Comté. The people of both were French; but while the duchy was a fief of France, the county was a fief of the Empire. And there were two great lines of Burgundian dukes: the first the Robertine descended from Robert king of France son of Hugh Capet; and the second, the Valois line descended from Charles of Valois brother of Philip-the-fair.
The last duke of the Robertine line was Philip de Rouvre, so called from the castle of Rouvre where he was born near Dijon. He inherited both Burgundies and Artois from his grandfather, his father having been killed at the siege of Aiguillon. Now this Philip de Rouvre, like some of my readers, is an interesting personage only by the woman he married; and to his wife rather than to him I ask your attention.
She was Margaret daughter of Louis de Mâle, count of Flanders, lord of Ghent, of Bruges, of Ypres and of other municipalities of the Low Countries. Margaret was his only child and heir. It was she who was destined to bring to the House of Burgundy, those first acquisitions in the Netherlands which were to draw the rest after them, and make the Spanish Hapsburgs counts of Flanders, of La Franche Comté, of Holland, of Hainault; dukes of Brabant, lords of Ghent, etc., an accumulation of titles by no means empty, such as the world had never seen before. In a word, Margaret of Flanders was to lay the foundation of the Belgic wing of the empire of Charles-the-fifth.
Margaret was very young when she married Philip de Rouvre, and not long after their espousals Philip died of the plague, leaving Margaret childless; and the great Robertine line which had worn the ducal coronet three centuries, was ended. How then was this childless widow to fulfil the destiny we have marked out for her?
We will leave her to ponder that problem, and take up our story at another point.
John of Valois king of France was called John II., though you have to look with a microscope into French history, to discover John I. No chapter bears his name at the head of it. (v. Captivity, page 62.) John II. was called John-the-good for no reason that history has explained. If he ever did anything that was good, it has shared the fate of the men who lived before Agamemnon. He was not even a good soldier for a king, though very pugnacious. His idea of military strategy was to shut down his visor, couch his lance and spur into the thickest of the fight.
In following up these tactics at the battle of Poictiers, he was knocked off his horse. He could not rise for the weight of his armor; so his attendants set him up on end, and he instantly began to lay about him again, on foot, with his accustomed fury. His eldest son the dauphin, seeing that the battle was lost, turned on his heel and ran away; and not only lived to fight another day but to rule France so well that he gained the name of Charles-the-wise. Not so Charles’ youngest brother Philip a boy of sixteen. He stood by his sire to the end; and as the enemy pressed in now on this side and now on that, he would cry out: Look out father, on the right! look out father on the left! and would throw himself in front, and play at cut and thrust like a gladiator.
But they might better have followed the example of the dauphin and run away; for they were soon borne to the ground and carried off prisoners to England. There they were graciously received by Edward III. and queen Philippa both of whom were related to their prisoners. Indeed John and Philippa were first cousins, both grandchildren of Charles of Valois.
After the battle of Poictiers, John gave to the brave boy who had stood by him, the name of Philip-the-bold; and a touch of that quality in England, confirmed the title. At dinner one day the cup-bearer poured out wine to Edward before he did to John. This was a double breach of etiquette: John was not only a guest, but he was the feudal superior, Edward owing him homage as duke of Aquitaine. Philip was so indignant at this slight to his father, that he jumped up and boxed the cup-bearer’s ears. Thou art indeed Philip-the-bold! exclaimed Edward more amused than vexed.
But the appellation was premature. Philip grew to be as prudent as he was brave. On the whole he resembled his brother Charles-the-wise more than he did his father the fighting John.
Philip was his father’s idol, and this idolatry was of grave portent to France. Though John had three older sons, he would have left to Philip the crown of France itself if the laws of the realm had permitted; but this being impossible he did the next worst thing.
At the death of Philip de Rouvre there was strife for the Robertine inheritance. Artois and La Franche Comté fell to Margaret of France daughter of Philip V. We shall meet this lady again. The duchy of Burgundy was claimed by king John and by Charles-the-bad, king of Navarre, both descended from the Robertines through females. On this footing the claim of Charles was the best; but John backed up his by pleading that Burgundy was a male fief, and that the male line being extinct, the duchy escheated to him as king of France. The only answer to this logic was the ultima ratio regum; but Charles-the-bad’s badness had so alienated his friends and allies, that he was in no condition for that species of arbitrement; so the bad claim of John-the-good prevailed over the good claim of Charles-the-bad, and the duchy of Burgundy was united to the crown.
It was a priceless acquisition: every dictate of prudence, of policy, of patriotism demanded that it should be sacredly kept: it was immediately thrown away by an act of fatuity which was the climax of the bad reign of John-the-good. John issued a patent creating his beloved Philip Duke of Burgundy, and ceding the duchy to him and to his heirs forever. Thus was founded in the person of Philip-the-bold, the famous second House of Burgundy.
We left a page or two ago, Margaret of Flanders duchess dowager of Burgundy, widowed and childless. She was still young, and if not quite handsome, any short-coming in that respect was made up by the provinces that were to fall to her from her father the Count Louis; and there came suitors a-plenty to offer consolation to her bereaved heart. Distinguished among these consolers were first, Edmund Langley fifth son of Edward III.; second, Philip of Valois the new duke of Burgundy. Edmund seemed to have the lead. He found a good ally in his mother Philippa who was herself half Valois as we have seen; but her heart was English: she hated her French cousins, and now put forth all her energy to win away from them this rich prize. She pleaded so well with count Louis that he consented to give his daughter to Edmund. But there was another woman who had something to say, namely Margaret of France the lady I had the honor of introducing to you a few moments ago. She was the mother of count Louis and grandmother of the young widow who was named after her. She was thoroughly French and hated her English cousins as cordially as Philippa hated her French ones; and she declared that not if she could prevent it, should her granddaughter marry that Plantagenet, that Cockney. She and her son held a stormy interview. Louis was long recalcitrant; but she finally used an argument to which he listened. She was in her own right countess of Artois and of La Franche Comté, and she threatened to cede those provinces to the crown, so that neither he nor his should ever possess one rood of them. Now Louis was in the prime of life and hoped to survive his mother, and to enjoy Artois and La Franche Comté with the rest of his princely inheritance, and there was nothing to do but to yield. He took back his word to Edmund, and gave it to Philip. But there was still another personage to consult. Edmund, Philip and Margaret were all related and not very remotely: they were all three great-great-grand children of Philip III. Canon law forbade the marriage of relations up to the seventh degree; and as nobody knew very well where the seventh degree was, the Church had simplified matters by declaring it to mean any relationship that could be traced. A papal dispensation was therefore necessary; and the case was referred to Urban V. who sat upon the throne of Avignon: it was for him to say in favor of which aspirant he would suspend the canon.
Some of you may think they ought have asked Margaret herself which of her admirers she loved best. The chronicles intimate that like a devout widow she was ready to take thankfully whatever husband the Holy Father should choose for her. Urban V. was a Frenchman, and it did not take him long to decide in favor of the French suitor; and in June 1369, Philip-the-bold and Margaret of Flanders were married at Ghent.
That no kind heart may be troubled about Edmund Langley, I will add that that unsuccessful swain went and manfully offered himself to a pretty Spanish girl, natural daughter of Peter-the-cruel; and a descendant of that loving pair sits at this moment on the throne of England.
Philip and Margaret had got as far as Bruges on their wedding tour when they were out of money, and it seems their credit was so poor that they could borrow none without security; so they had to pawn all their jewels to defray their way back to Paris.[6]
The bride and groom after a short stay at Paris, refitted the castle of Rouvre the birthplace and residence of Margaret’s first husband, the last of the Robertines. Behold then dame Margaret once more mistress of Rouvre, wedded to a second Philip, and a second time duchess of Burgundy. She could now solve the problem; and in pursuance of that worthy end, two years after her marriage, she brought forth a son. It was a wondrous infant: nothing short of the pope himself would do for its godfather; so that Gregory XI. successor of Urban, stood by proxy at the font, and called the boy’s name John; and as he grew up in the fear of neither God nor man, he become known as John-the-fearless.
John-the-good’s badness was ended; and his son Charles V. called the Wise, reigned. He was as unlike his foolish and fighting sire as possible. He was probably brave like the rest of his race, though he disclaimed any such virtue, and ran away at Poictiers; but he was passed master in the school of diplomacy.
The Plantagenets had inherited, as we have said, nearly one-third of France; and they coveted the rest. This covetousness was backed up by the English people who were ignorant enough not to see that they were fighting to degrade the crown of England to a mere apanage of the crown of France.
So long as the reign of the incapable John lasted, Edward III. had had his own way; but the prudence and adroitness of Charles, worked a change. Seconded by his brother Philip and by his constable Du Guesclin, he took without a battle, town after town, castle after castle, till Edward declared that the most formidable of his enemies was the one who did not fight. This new style of warfare was illustrated by the capture of La Rochelle. The castle was held by an English garrison, and to hold the castle was to hold the town. One day the chief magistrate asked the English commander to dinner. While at table, a forged despatch was brought to the Englishman. It was an order to march his garrison into the public square for a review. He had taken wine enough to be confident of his luck, so he obeyed the order. The townsmen who were watching for their chance, seized the castle and the garrison shut out of their stronghold and outnumbered, surrendered.
As a rule the Plantagenets waged these wars with a ferocity which contributed to their failure. But they were not Englishmen; and it is strange that English historians should accept their misdeeds as one element of national glory. Green says they were “English to the core.” Well, there was not one whole drop of insular blood in their veins: there was, to be sure, a fraction of a drop coming from Matilda daughter of the Malcolm of Macbeth and grandmother of the first Plantagenet king; and that was all. They were French Spaniards, and their pedigree was even more enriched with Moorish blood than with English.[7]
But there were some honorable exceptions to their usual behavior. The duke of Gloucester youngest son of Edward III. was besieging Troyes. A French knight named Micaille sent a challenge to any English knight to fight with him for the love of his sweetheart. These by-fights were often to settle precedence of beauty between respective sweethearts. A knight no sooner fell in love than he went swaggering about daring every other knight in love or out, to fight; and these combats were often mortal. An Englishman named Fitzwalter accepted the challenge. The lists were held in the English camp. Gloucester who was so learned on the subject of these duels that he wrote a treatise on them which still exists, laid down the rule that the lance should be addressed either to the shield or the helmet and not elsewhere. The Englishman’s horse was unruly and disturbed his aim, so that he took his adversary in the thigh, and inflicted an ugly wound. The duke pronounced the blow a foul one, and adjudged the victory to the Frenchman who had splintered his lance duly and truly against the buckler of his opponent. English surgeons dressed his wound, and English soldiers carried him back with honor to the French garrison.
Charles V. married Jane of Bourbon a princess of that youngest branch of the Capetiens which finally came to the throne. His nobles had made an earnest effort to have him instead of his brother Philip, marry Margaret of Flanders. Had he done so, Flanders, Artois and La Franche Comté would have fallen early to the French crown; and the history of the Valois dukes might have been as uninteresting as that of their predecessors the Robertines.
It shows of how little account the Bourbons were at that time, that the king’s marriage was looked upon as a sort of misalliance; and the duke of Bourbon Queen Jane’s brother was not admitted to a share in the government because his estates were not considered ample enough.
Charles-the-wise died after a reign of sixteen years during which he had found a remedy for all the misrule of his father except the alienation of Burgundy: that was beyond cure; but as Philip was always true to his brother and to France, it was not yet that the evil was apparent.
Charles was succeeded by his son Charles VI. who was but eleven years old; and duke Philip became regent. Philip’s two brothers were nominally joined with him in the regency; but they were unworthy scions of royalty, the one intent only on filling his pockets, the other on filling his belly; so that in effect the whole power rested with Philip. The duke of Bourbon the young king’s uncle again sought a share in the government, and was again denied. Such at the close of the fourteenth century, were the ancestors of Louis XIV. haughtiest of monarchs.
Duke Philip led the young monarch to Rheims to be crowned. He was to be knighted first, so the boy in obedience to the law of chivalry, sat up all night in the cathedral, watching his arms, ready to meet face to face the caitiff who should attempt to steal them. In the morning the sword Joyeuse, sword of Charlemagne, was girded to his loins. His uncle the duke of Anjou bestowed the accolade and pronounced him a belted knight. The archbishop of Rheims poured on his head oil from the sacred vase a dove had brought to Saint Rémi for the baptism of Clovis, and pronounced him an anointed king.
The attention of Philip was soon called to the affairs of his father-in-law Count Louis. Some years before, a brewer of Ghent named Jacob Van Artevelde had headed a sedition and erected himself into a sort of tribune of the people. Queen Philippa who was by birth a Fleming and liked to meddle with Flemish business, was his patron. Like a true politician she had deigned to stand godmother to the brewer’s son, and to have him named Philip after herself. The father Jacob Van Artevelde like his cotemporary Rienzi, was put to death by the populace he had sought to befriend; and this son now a man grown, was residing at Ghent a prosperous gentleman.
Philip Van Artevelde has been much apotheosised by English poets and dramatists: sober history hardly bears out the deification. Under a tranquil exterior he hid an eager and ruthless ambition which was only waiting its opportunity; and that opportunity was at hand. The inhabitants of Bruges had obtained from Count Louis permission to cut a canal to the Scheldt so as to go to sea that way. The citizens of Ghent remonstrated saying that themselves only had a right to go to sea by the Scheldt. The remonstrance proving fruitless they fitted out a band of ruffians who slew the men digging the canal. Count Louis sent a messenger to Ghent demanding reparation: they killed the messenger.
Thus far the case was not beyond adjustment: there were more men to dig canals; and the count had more messengers; but the Ghenters incontinently went to a length which put them out of the pale of forgiveness. Count Louis had just finished the beautiful castle of Vandelhem. All the resources of architecture and of art had been lavished upon it. It was his boast, his pride, his bawble. He confessed that he prized it beyond all else on earth. The Ghenters broke into Vandelhem and left it a ruin. War was inevitable.
The head mischief maker of Ghent was Peter Dubois called by the Dutch, Vandenbosche. He recalled to Van Artevelde the noble career of his father, and told him that the prestige of his name was all that was needed for the success of the revolt. He found a willing listener, but misled by the gentle manners of Van Artevelde, he expressed a fear that he might not be equal to the rough work, and dwelt on the necessity of showing no mercy to the Brugian faction. Van Artevelde assured him that if blood was all there should flow enough of it; and the two conspirators having come to an understanding, levied their troops.
Van Artevelde to get his hand in, cut the heads off of twelve burgesses of Ghent who had taken part against his father, and applied the same discipline to the syndic of the weavers who was in favor of law and order. Count Louis not to be outdone in barbarity, took the town of Grammont which favored the insurgents, and put to the sword men women and children. The bishop of Liége and the duke of Brabant interfered, and a conference was held. Two deputies of Ghent met two deputies of the count; and preliminaries were adjusted. When the Ghentian pacificators returned, Dubois and Van Artevelde met them at the town-hall. How dare you treat for peace! cried Dubois, and he ran his man through with his dagger, while Van Artevelde despatched the other.
The two chieftains now resolved on a master stroke, the capture of Bruges. Count Louis hastened to intercept them. His force was superior to theirs; but Van Artevelde made a stirring speech to his men showing them that victory was their only chance even for life. He seized a convent of monks and compelled them to confess the soldiers and administer the communion, and thus prepare them to fight to the death. They won the obstinate battle which followed and took Bruges. The count fled through the town, the enemy at his heels. He dodged down an obscure street and into an obscure lodging where a woman a true Brugian who hated the Ghenters, put him to bed in the garret with her children till the pursuit was over.
The count appealed for aid to his son-in-law duke Philip. The latter gentleman was not well pleased to see his wife’s patrimony wasted by brewers of beer, so he levied an army in France and marched into Flanders. The king who was now fourteen and whose blood was on fire at the sound of a trumpet, insisted on accompanying the expedition. They met the insurgents at Rosebeke near Ypres. Van Artevelde and Dubois flushed with their previous success, were confident of victory. Van Artevelde himself issued the order that no quarter be given. Slay every Frenchman, cried he, except the young king! Bring him to Ghent and we will teach him to speak Flemish.
But they had left out of their reckoning one factor which perhaps oftener than any other determines the fate of battle. Duke Philip though himself a good captain, was prudent enough not to trust to his own soldiership when better was at hand. He had put his army under the command of Oliver de Clisson constable of France, the worthy successor of Du Guesclin. The stubborn courage of the Netherlanders was of no avail against the skill with which De Clisson directed his legions; and at the close of a bloody day the men of Ghent were routed.
At night-fall as the king, the duke, the count and the constable were walking over the field of battle, picking their way among the slain, a dying soldier raised his arm and pointed to a heap of dead bodies close by. They dragged aside alternate Frenchman and Fleming till they came to all that remained of Philip Van Artevelde. He had died like a soldier where the fight was the hottest. Dubois escaped wounded to England.
Charles-the-wise when dying had counselled his brother of Burgundy to marry the young king to a German princess in order to strengthen alliance with the Empire. Stephen duke of Bavaria had a daughter named Isabella; and the duchess Margaret together with her friend and gossip the duchess of Brabant resolved to make the match. Isabella was fourteen. She was handsome enough, but she was an uncouth tomboy and dressed in a style that was anything but French. The duchess of Brabant took her in hand, and by much discipline of her own seconded by a French dancing-master and a French dressmaker, succeeded in breaking this romping Rhinelander into some semblance of polite behavior. She was presented to the king who was now seventeen. She knelt at his feet with perfect grace: he raised her up and made a common-place remark, and she said just the right thing in reply. She had been made to rehearse the whole scene beforehand, in the king’s absence. He was charmed with her beauty and her manners, and he fell in love with her and married her. She turned out to be a veritable Messalina and did what she could to add to the misfortunes of France.
Another notable marriage a year later, that is in 1387, was that of the king’s brother Louis duke of Orleans with his cousin Valentina daughter of Galeazzo Visconti lord of Milan. The Visconti were rich, and a million of florins went to the dowry of Valentina. This marriage too brought disaster a century later when the great-grandson of Louis and Valentina, in attempting to recover the patrimony of the Visconti, was led captive to Madrid.
The constable De Clisson, the victor of Rosebeke, had a bitter enemy in John de Montfort duke of Brittany. One night in Paris, De Clisson returning from an entertainment given by Louis and Valentina, was suddenly attacked and knocked senseless into the doorway of a baker’s shop. The baker dragged him in and sent for a surgeon. The king himself who was fond of the constable, came to see him. The blow was not fatal; and De Clisson had recognised his assailant. It was a well known myrmidon of the duke of Brittany. The king vowed vengeance. His uncle of Burgundy tried to pacify him and to persuade him to leave the matter to him; but the king was not to be pacified; and duke Philip was obliged to follow him into Brittany with an armed force.
It was the first week in August, and the heat was intense. The king in order to suffer less from the dust, was riding separate from the rest. Suddenly he wheeled his horse and crying out Death to the traitors! charged upon the nearest of his followers. They all scattered till one of them, a tall trooper, pounced on him from behind and pinioned him. He was stark mad; and during the rest of his long and calamitous reign his reason returned only at intervals.
The king’s malady arrested the expedition against De Montfort; and De Clisson who recovered from his wound, was left to be his own avenger. He was not slack about it; and if he was not so powerful as his adversary, he was the better soldier, so between them both they stirred up a civil war of such dimensions, that the duke of Burgundy who was again regent was obliged to interfere. Dame Margaret his duchess was related to the Montforts, so as he valued peace at his own fire-side he thought best to proceed with caution. He sent to his cousin of Brittany a few puncheons of the finest Burgundy wine, and followed himself with a retenue of archers and men-at-arms. De Montfort relished the wine more than he did the visitors: the latter looked suspiciously like an armament, and he promised to keep the peace.
The rest reads like romance and yet is history. De Clisson received from the duke of Brittany, from the man who had plotted his assassination, a message offering reconciliation, and inviting him to a personal interview. The constable was not to be caught with chaff. He answered that he would come provided the duke’s eldest son was put in his hands as a hostage. To his astonishment the boy, the heir of the Montforts, was sent to him. The meeting took place, and John de Montfort and Oliver de Clisson were friends ever after; and years later when the duke went to Paris to marry this boy to the king’s daughter, he left de Clisson in charge of his domains and his household.
These were the days of the Great Schism, the days of two rival popes Urban VI. and Clement VII. and the division of Christendom into two factions, the Urbanists and the Clementists. (See Captivity of Babylon.)
The king had displayed some excellent and even brilliant qualities; and his sudden insanity drew forth expressions of sympathy from all parts of Europe. As to its cause opinions differed. The clergy of England and Flanders who were Urbanists, preached that it was because the king upheld the schismatic pope of Avignon; the clergy of France and Spain who were Clementists, that it was because the king had not invaded Italy and deposed the schismatic pope of Rome. The laity were convinced that the king was bewitched, and they even pointed out the wicked persons who had done it. Among these was the duchess Valentina whom the king regarded with brotherly affection. The evidence against her was that she was an Italian: were not all the Italians sorcerers and necromancers? Hermits and other holy men far and near were summoned to exorcise the king and cast the devil out of him. One cross-grained philosopher, half ecclesiastic half physician, with a scepticism that did not belong to the fourteenth century, maintained that Charles was neither bewitched nor bedevilled; that the schism had nothing to do with it; that the clergy were a pack of fools and the people brute beasts; that it was simply a case of mental breaking-down from over excitement and dissipation. The Church had received such rough handling from Philip-the-fair, that it dared not interfere; and this sciolist was left to flaunt his unbelief in the faces of the devout.
The duke of Burgundy’s oldest son John, god-son of the pope, was now twenty-five. He was small of stature but well knit and vigorous and a good soldier. Burning for glory he led a detachment of French and Flemings to the aid of the king of Hungary against the Turk Bajazet. They were successful in a skirmish and took some prisoners. To these they offered the choice either to turn Christians or to be slain. A French monk was sent who exhorted them long and earnestly; but they did not understand French, and consequently gave no evidence of conviction and conversion: they were put to death accordingly. The battle of Nicopolis followed, where the Christians were totally defeated. John and some of his comrades were brought before Bajazet who reminded them of their cruelty to their own prisoners, and ordered the heads to be struck off of all except John and one or two others for whose ransom he expected large sums. Legend says that a soothsayer warned Bajazet not to kill John of Burgundy; that that Frankish prince was destined to be more fatal to his brother misbelievers than all the Turks in Asia Minor.
The duke when he heard of his son’s captivity, laid a tax on his dominions and sent the required ransom to Bajazet who dismissed John with the remark that whenever he chose to come again on the same errand, he might count on the same welcome.
Good and pious churchmen all over Europe had tried in vain to put an end to the strife between two rival pontiffs who missed no occasion to curse each other in all those awful formulas provided for the heretical and reprobate; and the secular powers had at last taken the matter up.
The king had had a long season of being rational; and the duke of Burgundy thought it a favorable time for a conference between the king and the emperor on the state of the schism. The duke as a Frenchman, leaned toward the see of Avignon, but he kept it to himself because Dame Margaret being a Fleming, was of the other persuasion. Rheims the capital of Champagne was chosen as the place of meeting. It was a bad choice as we shall see.
Wenceslas emperor of Germany was a reformer who believed in the high hand and the out-stretched arm. On one occasion suspecting the fidelity of his wife, he summoned her spiritual director, and commanded him to divulge what he had heard from her lips at the confessional. The priest refused. The emperor ordered him sewed up in a sack and thrown into the Moldau; and the empress had to look for another confessor. But the emperor had one failing: he was by spells convivial, and then he was sometimes as delirious as the king of France himself.
It was in the autumn of 1397 that these two high consulting parties arrived at Rheims. The emperor was followed by his landgraves, his margraves, his burgraves and other grave gentlemen who talked German together so gravely that you would have sworn they understood each other. The king escorted by the duke of Burgundy, came with equal splendor. Charles was beginning to show symptoms of returning wildness; but that only made him all the more bent on the interview. Wenceslas on his part, had so strengthened his mind with the delicious wines of Champagne that he was ready to deal with a score of schisms.
They met, they conferred, they argued, they disputed, they quarrelled, they shouted. They called each other schismatics, heretics, traitors, liars, thieves, assassins, till their respective attendants were fain to bear them bodily forth, the one raving drunk, the other raving crazy.
The imperial diet was so little satisfied with this reformer’s success at the conference, that they passed upon him a sentence of deposition. He appealed from the sentence; and it was agreed that the duke of Burgundy and the French Council of State should arbitrate. Wenceslas sent as his advocate John of Moravia the most learned doctor of laws in Europe, who delivered before the duke and council a speech several hours long in latin of which they understood not one word. The diet on its side, sent Stephen of Bavaria the queen’s father who took with him an adroit pettifogging lawyer who spoke French. It was natural that the arbitrators should lean toward the pleadings they comprehended, and they gave in their adherence to the action of the diet. Rupert, count Palatine was elected emperor in the place of Wenceslas.
The evil genius of France at this time, was the king’s brother Louis of Orleans the husband of Valentina. He was showy, accomplished and for a nobleman learned, but he was unprincipled. While squandering money in every extravagance he was in debt for the necessaries of life; and woe to the tradesman who dared present his bill! One day his horses ran away with him and nearly threw him into the Seine. In the imminent peril he made a vow to the Virgin that he would pay his debts. He called his creditors together, and after a touching address in which he ascribed the glory of his rescue to the Queen of Heaven, he dismissed them without their money.
His uncle of Burgundy had excluded him from the council of State; and he put forth all his resources which were considerable, to embarrass the public business. He protested against the approval of the diet, and raised fifteen hundred soldiers and marched or pretended to march to the aid of the fallen emperor. He threatened to go to deliver the pope who was held in a sort of honorable captivity in his palace at Avignon. During the absence of the duke in Flanders, Louis and his compeer in evil, Queen Isabella, seized the reins of government and filled Paris with their satellites. The duke came back with an armed force and bloodshed was threatened; but the two dukes came to a truce and appeared in the streets, riding side by side, to the relief of well-disposed people.
Duke Philip soon returned to Flanders, and while in apparent health he was attacked by a disease then prevalent and which was probably typhoid fever, and died in his castle of Hal, in April 1404, in his seventy-third year. Philip-the-bold was the first and best of the Valois dukes of Burgundy. If the French people were not happy under his administration, it was that happiness could not be their lot. Their country was desolated by the English wars, and war was uppermost in their minds. Even in intervals of peace they would have no peace; and military games not always bloodless were the amusement of all classes. On one occasion a challenge was received from the English pale, that seven French knights should meet seven English to fight à outrance, which means mortal combat. The challenge was accepted. The most noted of the French seven was Tanneguy du Châtel whom we shall meet again in a scene of bloodshed more important. (See Two Jaquelines.) The English knights had planned that at the onset, two of them at once should attack Du Châtel, and he done for they thought to have an easy bargain of the rest. This would of course leave for a moment one of the French champions without an antagonist, and they arranged that this floating warrior should be one they feared the least. This was an awkward gentleman from Champagne, of no great renown, who had been let into the French seven for his ponderous strength. When the signal was given, this unwieldy knight for want of something better, threw himself upon the stoutest of the English seven, and with a single blow laid him dead at his feet. The English could not overcome this disadvantage and were worsted. It is but just to say that the French chroniclers explain differently the defeat of the English. The French seven, before the fight, had heard mass and received the communion, while the English had neglected that precaution.
The king’s mental disorder grew worse. The worthless queen abandoned him on the plea that she was afraid of him, and he was often shamefully neglected. While the whole court was drinking the choicest wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux, the king was served with such abominable piquette, that he was often doubled up with the colic. It is true he was at times stubborn and violent. On one occasion he refused to wash his face and put on clean linen. Three stout fellows sprang in upon him and by main strength washed him and changed him.
The opinion that he was possessed was nearly universal, and means of casting out the evil spirit were not omitted. Three famous exorcists, a priest, a locksmith and a woman who had had much success in that branch of therapeutics, came to cure him. They took him out into a grove, and seated him in a magic chair. They planted around him twelve stakes to each of which was attached a chain, every seventh link of silver. Then they announced that twelve persons of repute must be fastened to the stakes by the neck. Such was the devotion to the monarch that knights, magistrates, burgesses all pressed to offer themselves. Twelve were chosen and with their faces toward the king were chained not tight enough to choke them but enough to give them a gruesome expression which would now be called weird. The incantation was in full blast when one of the twelve losing either faith or breath crossed himself. This broke the spell, and the king lapsed into a worse frenzy than ever.
In March 1405, Margaret countess of Flanders, double duchess dowager of Burgundy died, having survived her second Philip but eleven months. She seems to have been every way reputable and worthy except that she was imperious and domineering. Philip either from unswerving affection or because he knew what would be his portion at home if he did not behave, was always true to her, a virtue not much in vogue in those days. The contention between him and his nephew of Orleans, was fully shared by their wives; and the lofty airs of the Flemish dame were not put up with submissively by the high-spirited Italian: indeed those two august ladies at times so far forgot their augustness as to call each other names.
John-the-fearless was now duke of Burgundy and count of Flanders. In the French peerage, Burgundy was held to outrank Orleans, and John claimed to be first peer of the realm. His claim did not pass undisputed: Louis of Orleans was the king’s brother and in default of the king’s sons, might become king himself; and bitter as had been the feud between him and his uncle, that between him and his cousin, was so much more so that it was fated to destroy them both.
John and Louis mustered their respective forces and marched to Paris. The old duke of Berri uncle to both and to the king, brought about a truce. Then as troops were ready for any mischief, Louis proposed to lead their joint levies against the English provinces; and John consented in hopes that some honest Cockney or Gascon might knock him on the head.
A girl who was crazy and therefore considered inspired, told Louis that the expedition would succeed provided he kissed the head of Saint Denis before setting out. He was proceeding to the abbey of Saint Denis for that purpose when the canons of Notre Dame informed him that it was they who possessed the true head of the saint, and that the other was a fraud. The monks of the abbey retorted the charge of imposture; the canons answered back; and these two reverend bodies opened upon each other such a fire of abuse and recrimination that the king who happened to be rational, imposed silence on them both. In the uncertainty, Louis must have kissed the wrong head, for the expedition failed. It was now duke John’s turn; he made an attack upon Calais and was repulsed. On his return the quarrel between him and Louis broke out more fiercely than ever. Once more did their uncle of Berri interpose and bring them to partake of the communion together; but it was too late, the feud was mortal.
Louis was intimate with the queen and passed much of his time in her company. One night when he was supping with her, the message came that the king wished to see him. He mounted his mule and escorted by a few servants carrying torches, took his way toward the king’s lodgings. Suddenly he was attacked by armed men. Thinking there was some mistake he cried out I am the duke of Orleans! You are the man we want, was the response, and they struck him down and left him dead.
Even at that time when acts of violence were so common, the murder of the king’s brother in the streets of the capital, gave a shock to the court; and vigorous search was made for the assassins. Suspicion fell at first on the lord of Canny whose wife Louis had misled; but it was soon shown that Canny was many leagues away that night. Evidence at last pressed so close around John of Burgundy that he confessed the deed. He laid the blame to the devil who he said had put him up to it. At the same time he proclaimed the duke of Orleans a public enemy deservedly slain. He employed a Franciscan named John Petit renowned for his eloquence, to justify the act. The monk in an oration which has come down to us, and in which dates, events, personages, customs, creeds, epochs are jumbled together in matchless confusion, demonstrated that the taking off of Louis de Valois was the most righteous taking off since the day when Samuel hewed Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.
Felon as he was, John was still popular with the Parisiens. He had a good deal of rough talent and many of the arts of the politician. Moreover he paid his debts, a rare virtue for a prince of the blood of those days. His father had died owing his butcher and his grocer and his tailor, and John had not hesitated to sell the furniture of his town palace the hotel Artois, to pay these tradesmen. They had not forgotten how his rival had served them on that solemn occasion when all the glory was ascribed to Our Lady; and they were not to blame if they preferred the man who paid to the man who did not.
Duke John married Margaret of Bavaria, and her brother William, Count of Hainault, married John’s sister Margaret. It was decreed that no Margaret should marry without bringing increased power to the house of Burgundy; and it was the nuptials of these two Margarets that made possible some years later, the violence and fraud which wrested Holland, Zealand, Hainault and other provinces from John’s niece Jaqueline, sole issue of the last named marriage. (See Two Jaquelines).
John’s wife Margaret had another brother, John of Bavaria, bishop of Liége, called John-the-pitiless, a riotous prelate and a cruel, whose riotings and whose cruelties were to be one more element of strength to the dukes of Burgundy. The town of Liége on the river Meuse, was a fief of the Empire, but was under ecclesiastical government. The chief magistrate was a bishop. The reigning diocesan at this time, was that disreputable brother-in-law of John-the-fearless. The inhabitants of Liége weary of his unclerical behavior, had driven him out of their territory. He besought his brother of Burgundy to reinstate him; and John, with an eye to acquiring that sort of predominance over both diocese and diocesan, which is now-a-days called a protectorate, levied his troops. The Liégeois prepared to receive him. The two armies met at Hasbain. The duke’s force was small but well disciplined. The Liégeois aided by five hundred English archers were the stronger, and so proud a front did they present, that the duke’s lieutenants warned him of the risk of a general engagement. What, cried he, have I come as far as this to quail before a rabble of tinkers and tailors! and he gave the signal for combat.
There is no doubt that John-the-fearless was in his element on the field of battle. He did not, as did his grandfather John-the-good, mount his charger and precipitate himself into the wrong place at the wrong moment; but astride an active little jennet, he flew from rank to rank, directing everything and inspiring everybody. The Liégeois charged in column upon his centre. His pikemen stood firm. He detached a body of cavalry which spurred into the flank of the advancing column, and it gave way.
Just before the battle John had confessed and received absolution and eucharist, so that his conscience was clear for a new score. He ordered that no quarter be given, and the conflict became a massacre. But few of the men of Liége escaped. Their leader a citizen named Pervez was found dead on the field, still holding by the hand, his son dead by his side.
The Liégeois were crushed, and their mitred but unregenerate suzerain was again set to reign over them. What with those who had perished in the massacre and those he threw directly after into the Meuse, it would seem that he had not many subjects left to govern.
In the articles of submission which the surviving few were compelled to sign, it was agreed that if they were again disobedient, they were to be laid under that awful discipline an interdict, provided there existed any authority competent to fulminate interdicts. The Schism comes up again to explain this curious proviso. The Council of Pisa was sitting to restore unity to the Church. They had declared the throne of Saint Peter to be one and indivisible; and they had declared it vacant in spite of the incumbent at Rome and the incumbent at Avignon. They had elected a new pope to that vacancy. The other two refused to abdicate, so there were three popes; and as each was himself under double interdict by the anathemas launched at him by his own rivals, it was doubtful whether a rescript from such maimed authority would be canonical. So paralysed was the Church that even her curses would no longer hold. The degree to which they recovered their validity when the Schism was healed, is a point of history that illustrates the saying that truth is stranger than fiction.
The news of the victory of Hasbain was not good news to the queen and the court who favored the Orleans faction, and were alarmed at the growing power of the duke of Burgundy. A council was held, and the king spirited away to Tours. An accidental delay of the duke, gave them time for this. He had stopped at Lille to settle a quarrel between his brother, Anthony and his brother-in-law William of Hainault, touching 50,000 florins left by the late duchess of Brabant. They were on the point of deciding by mortal combat which should have the money, when the duke came. I regret I cannot inform you which of them got the 50,000 florins.
The escape of the king from under his hand, was a serious loss to the duke who was aiming at supreme control; and on reaching Paris he bent all his diplomacy to recover possession of the monarch. He won over the grand master of the king’s household, a parvenu named Montague; and by his means Charles was brought back to the capital.
Montague by minding his own business, had grown wealthy; and as he was now of no further use to his new friends, they put him to torture, and made him confess a list of crimes he had never committed. They then cut off his head, gibbetted his carcass, and divided his estates among them, duke John getting the castle of Marcoussis for his share.
When the distracted king came slowly and mistily to a sense of the way his faithful steward had been done to death, and his wealth seized by his murderers, he was wroth. He wandered about the palace of Saint Paul muttering vengeance; but the queen who in the meantime had sold herself to the Burgundians, represented to him how unseemly it was for a parvenu like Montague to own castles; and Charles after a vain struggle to master the point, let it drop.
We propose incidentally to resume the history of the dukes of Burgundy in our essay on the Jaquelines.
Madame de Sévigné said that Providence favors the best battalions. It was she who was the author of that remark, and not Frederick-the-great nor Napoleon nor others to whom it is attributed. It has not always proved true. Henry V., ablest of the Plantagenets, at the head of the best armies then existing, tried to wrest the sceptre of France from the palsied hand of Charles VI., and perished in the attempt. From the loins of that crazy monarch and his worse than crazy queen, came forth that House of Tudor which, by the ordeal of battle, displaced the Plantagenet on the throne of England.
Much bad logic and worse history has been put forth in good English, touching the claim of Edward III. to the throne of France. It is often said that Edward denied the validity of the salic law. He did nothing of the kind. His theory was that the salic law, while it excluded females, did not exclude their progeny, and he claimed the crown of France by right of his mother Isabella daughter of Philip-the-fair. But even this theory gave the right to somebody else, as Hume has shown, and as we propose to make visible to the naked eye.
| Philip IV.=Joanna, queen regnant of Navarre | |||
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| Louis X. | Philip V. | Charles IV. | Isabella. |
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| Joanna. | Daughters. | Daughter. | Edward III. |
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| Charles-the-bad, King of Navarre | } | ||
Edward’s theory would have given the crown of France to Charles-the-bad, grandson of Louis X. It went to Philip of Valois, Philip VI. by right of unbroken male descent from Hugh Capet, as it did long afterwards to the House of Bourbon.
| Louis IX. Eighth in male line from Hugh Capet. | |
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| Philip III. | |
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| Philip IV. | Charles of Valois. |
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| Philip VI. | |
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| John II. | |
THEY were both Dutchwomen. They were contemporaries and lived in the fifteenth century. They both contributed, though unwittingly and by their love scrapes, to break the alliance between England and Burgundy, and thus to the salvation of the French monarchy. They were both of high lineage and married kings’ sons: one of them married two kings’ sons; and they both married commoners. One of them died without issue; the other by a misalliance with a simple knight, became the mother of a line of kings as long as that which Macbeth saw when the race of Banquo defiled before him. Indeed Macbeth on that dread occasion looked till he beheld those who “two fold balls and triple sceptres bore,” and those were of the generation of Jaqueline.
John-the-fearless, second of the four Valois dukes of Burgundy married Margaret of Bavaria. Her brother William of Bavaria was count of Hainault, lord of Holland, of Zealand, of Friesland and of nearly all the territory which now goes to make up the kingdom of the Netherlands. Now John having married William’s sister Margaret, William to be even with him, turned round and married John’s sister Margaret, Margaret of Valois, Margaret of Burgundy. These two princes having each married the other’s sister Margaret, were thus double brothers-in-law; and this close relationship did not breed any dissention between them: it was otherwise with their children who were, you perceive, double cousins. John and his Margaret were blest with one son and seven daughters. William and his Margaret had but one child, a daughter whom they christened Jaqueline. This lady is called by so many different names in history, that if you were not on your guard you might imagine there were half a dozen of them: Jaqueline of Bavaria, Jaqueline of Holland, Jaqueline of Hainault, Jaqueline of Brabant. Then the Dutch called her Jacoba; so some English writers affect to call her Jacoba, and ring the changes on it. But in spite of these manifold appellations she was but a sole and only child; and as the salic law did not rule in the low countries, she was a great heiress. Her situation was a repetition of that of her grandmother Margaret of Flanders except that the provinces they inherited respectively were different. (See Second House of Burgundy.)
The great expectations of Jaqueline entitled her to a distinguished husband, and when only five years old she was wedded to John of Touraine second son of Charles VI. The marriage was celebrated with much splendor at Compiegne, at the same time with that of prince John’s cousin the count of Angoulême who espoused Isabella, John’s sister, widow of Richard II. of England who had been murdered at Pomfret. It is said that the joy of these double nuptials was saddened by the tears of Isabella who wept aloud at having to give up the title of queen.
Not long after the marriage, John’s elder brother the dauphin died, and John himself became dauphin. Behold then our little Jaqueline in a fair way to become queen of France! But it was not to be: prince John died suddenly one day, and his death like all sudden death of exalted personages in those days, was attributed to poison. But the probability is that all the poison he took was what the doctors gave him in good faith, to cure him of a cold he had caught playing at tennis; and I may hold the case up to you as a warning either against tennis or the doctors as you prefer.
Jaqueline was eleven years old when her husband died. The same year, 1417, she lost also her father the count William. Thus from a great heiress she became a great potentate. She was of course too young to administer her own affairs; and they fell chiefly into the hand of her powerful uncle John-the-fearless. She was not only a great potentate but a stylish young widow, the best match in the market; and great was the scramble for her hand. Not a single princely fortune hunter in Europe but was dying of love for her.
After some years of widowhood, a family council was held, and it was determined that she should marry her cousin John duke of Brabant, son of Antony of Burgundy and Elizabeth of Luxembourg. Antony who was brother of John-the-fearless, had fallen at Agincourt. Jaqueline and the duke of Brabant being first cousins, a dispensation was of course necessary to their marriage; and they applied for one to the Roman pontiff Martin V. In the family council referred to, an active part had been taken by an uncle of Jaqueline on her father’s side, namely John-the-pitiless, bishop of Liége, whom we have already introduced to you in our paper on the House of Burgundy. He had approved of the betrothal, and had joined in the application to the pope; but he was secretly resolved to leave no stone unturned to seize his dead brother’s estates, the inheritance of Jaqueline; and indeed it is alleged that he was even manoeuvring to espouse her himself. He despatched furtively a messenger to the pope praying him to withhold the dispensation, or to revoke it if already granted, pleading that he had just discovered a flaw in his brother’s marriage with Margaret of Burgundy, that would render Jaqueline illegitimate. The dispensation was already on its way to Flanders; so the pontiff instantly put forth an annulment, and the one document arrived at the heels of the other. But when they came to unroll them they found that there was wanting to the revocation a bit of red tape and a leaden seal. In the great haste some functionary through whose hands it had passed, had neglected to attach those ornaments; and for the want of an ounce of lead, the annulment was of no weight, while the dispensation duly ballasted with that metal, was of force. The wedding party did not give the bishop time to have the error corrected, and the nuptials took place.
The bishop immediately levied ban and arrière ban and invaded the provinces of his niece. It was a favorable moment for him. Holland was convulsed with civil strife between two factions called the Fishhooks and the Codfish. The latter sided with the bishop, and the former with Jaqueline who flew in an undaunted manner to the rescue of her patrimony. The duke of Burgundy sent to the seat of war his son afterwards Philip-the-good; and that prince compelled both parties to lay down their arms. The duke then thought to pacify the bishop by investing him with the revenues of certain of his niece’s estates.
John-the-pitiless was bishop by brevet only. He had taken no orders higher than those of deacon, and therefore was not irrevocably a churchman. His plan to marry Jaqueline having failed, he fixed his eye on another bride. In order to carry out this fresh design upon the peace and tranquillity of the sex, he appealed to the pope for a decree of secularisation unfrocking him. The pope was compliant and the ex-bishop led to the altar, Elizabeth of Luxembourg relict of Anthony of Burgundy, mother of the duke of Brabant and mother-in-law of Jaqueline.
Jaqueline had been so busy fighting her demi-reverend uncle who had just assumed a nearer and dearer relationship to her, that she had given herself no time to see what sort of a husband she had married. She now took a good look at him and found that he was a puny, misshapen invalid, while her looking-glass and her friends told her that she had grown up into a handsome, wholesome, vigorous woman. They went to housekeeping however, and quarrelled like man and wife. One day while she was absent, her husband of Brabant took it upon him to dismiss all her Dutch hand-maidens, and send them back, bag and baggage, to Holland. The reason he gave for it was that they talked Dutch, a dialect he did not understand and did not commend. Jaqueline was not disposed to put up with this affront. She left him and went back to her mother who was residing at Valenciennes. She soon found life too dull there for a spirit as restless as hers, and planned an expedition to England. A retinue suitable to a princess of her rank was furnished her, and she crossed the channel.
England was at that time ruled by Henry V. the second king of the house of Lancaster. His queen was Catharine of France daughter of Charles VI., and sister of Jaqueline’s first husband prince John. Catharine was therefore her sister-in-law and her cousin. Henry was also related to her but more remotely through their common descent from Charles of Valois. Henry and Catharine received Jaqueline with great distinction, and invited her to stand godmother to their infant son afterwards the good and pious but unfortunate Henry VI.
In the family party assembled at the baptism, was the king’s youngest brother Humphrey duke of Gloucester, called by historians and by Shakspeare, the good duke of Gloucester. He looked wistfully across the font at his blooming Dutch cousin; and she, I am sorry to say, looked wistfully back at him. They fell in love and so desperately that they resolved that nothing should prevent their union, not even the crooked little duke of Brabant who was already the husband of Jaqueline. They applied to pope Martin to annul that marriage; and the pontiff usually so compliant, was obstinate in his refusal. We shall see by and by what was the cause of his obstinacy. But he was not the only pope. These were still the days of the Great Schism: a pope at Rome, and a pope at Avignon. To such a degree however, had the Eternal City regained its prestige, that at the epoch of our story, the greater number of the powers of Europe, had renounced the obedience of Avignon and gone over to that of Rome. Among the first that had done so, were the houses of Plantagenet and Bavaria, the houses to which our two lovers belonged. But to them the true pope was the pope who would let them marry. They had failed before Martin V., so they appealed from him to Benedict XIII. who sat in a kind of survival of grandeur on the throne of Avignon. Benedict, flattered that an English prince and a Flemish princess should abjure his rival and come over to him, granted a bull in due form annulling Jaqueline’s marriage with the duke of Brabant, and anathematising Martin V. Gloucester and Jaqueline were immediately united.
Leaving them to enjoy the honey-moon, we will go back and take a rapid survey of the events which gave political importance to their marriage.
One hot day in August 1392, Charles VI. had a sun-stroke and went crazy. The reins of government fell once more into the hands of his uncle Philip. (See House of Burgundy.) At the death of Philip a bitter contest for the supremacy broke out between his son John-the-fearless and Louis of Orleans, the king’s brother. This rivalry led to a desultory civil war interrupted by truces and pacifications during one of which, John-the-fearless thought to settle the dispute once for all, by a touch of his fearlessness. He assassinated his rival in the streets of Paris.
The stroke was to a great degree successful, and John duke of Burgundy was the greatest man in the realm. But the faction of Orleans though disorganised for the moment by the death of its chief, was not extinguished. The young duke son of the murdered man, had taken for his second wife the daughter of the count of Armagnac an energetic leader who put himself at the head of the Orleansists, and even gave them his name; and France was torn by the bloody strife between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs.
It was this state of things that tempted Henry V. of England to revive an absurd claim to the crown of France which had been trumped up as a pretext for plunder, by his great grandfather Edward III. Henry invaded France and won the battle of Agincourt. Both factions courted his alliance, each being more anxious to wreak vengeance on the other than to save their common country. Henry after some coquetting, sided with the Burgundians who were the stronger of the two, and held the north of France including the capital which they put into his hands. In that city he afterwards married Catharine daughter of Charles and Isabella, and was declared heir of the monarchy, in contempt of the rights of Catharine’s young brother the dauphin Charles. The demented king and his disreputable queen deserted the cause of their son and of France, and went over to the English. The dauphin himself was rescued from the clutches of his father and mother, by a bold stroke of Tanneguy du Châtel an Armagnac noble who broke into the boy’s lodging one night, snatched him out of bed, wrapped him up in his cloak, mounted his horse with him, and made good his escape; and Charles lived to recover his inheritance and more besides. The Armagnac faction thus became the party of the dauphin, the party of the nation and of the independence of France.
There were among the Burgundian barons some who remembered they were Frenchmen and who fought reluctantly on the side of England. These projected an interview between the dauphin and duke John, with a view of reconciling their differences, and uniting their arms against the common enemy. The meeting took place on the bridge of Montereau, and John-the-fearless was struck dead at the feet of the young prince. Thus did one foul murder avenge another murder equally foul committed twelve years before.
Some English writers inform you that John-the-fearless was assassinated by orders of the dauphin. Charles at that time was an indolent boy of sixteen; and he probably was not allowed to know that such an act was meditated. Indeed so impolitic was the murder that it is far from certain that there was any premeditation about it. It is much more likely that duke John fell a victim to a sudden outbreak of revenge on the part of nobles he had long pursued.
His son and successor Philip was in his twenty-third year. He is called in history Philip-the-good for reasons perhaps as satisfactory as in the case of his great grandfather king John II. He was good tempered however, and whenever his domestic servitors, his equerries and his chamberlains came to talk with him about household matters he received them affably instead of kicking them on the shins with his jack-boots as his sire had done, and as was indeed the style in those days.
Philip had married Charles’s sister Michelle of France; but he eagerly adopted the theory of his English counsellors, that Charles was the assassin; and he went home and exclaimed O Michelle your brother has murdered my father! The poor princess threw herself into his arms and declared that his enemies were her enemies, and the tragedy worked no breach between them.
But Philip thought of nothing but revenge. He sent an envoy to the English king offering a formal alliance with him for the destruction of the French monarchy. The astonishing treaty as Hume calls it, by which this prince of the blood royal of France declared himself the enemy of his family, of his country and of that throne to which he was so nearly related that in the chapter of chances he might become its heir, is called the treaty of Troyes from Troyes in Champagne where it was signed.[8]
It was about the time of this treaty that the English court was set agog by the flirtation between Jaqueline and the duke of Gloucester, and by the application they were making to both popes to open the way to their marriage. Nothing could be more threatening to the House of Burgundy than that an English prince should acquire Holland and the other provinces that had fallen to Jaqueline; and duke Philip, notwithstanding his alliance with Henry, interfered vigorously and successfully to prevent pope Martin from annulling the previous marriage of Jaqueline. When the annulment was finally obtained from Benedict, Philip appealed to Henry himself to stop the espousals by his royal authority. But Henry was quite willing his brother should win so great a prize. There was to be sure, hazard in it; but he trusted to his own address to keep Philip quiet, and allowed the marriage to take place. Nor did he trust in vain. That gifted monarch had sounded the depths and the shallows of his ally. He knew that Philip was the most pig-headed of mortals; and that he would submit to still greater humiliations rather than give up his schemes of vengeance.
Up to this time the arms of England had been successful; but they now met with a reverse the consequences of which were far-reaching; though English historians affect either to ignore the transaction, or to refer to it as an affair of no importance. Henry had gone back to England, leaving his victorious army under the command of his brother Thomas duke of Clarence. Thomas could not forgive himself for not having been at Agincourt on that day of glory; and he resolved to have an Agincourt of his own. The French under the Marshal de Lafayette—an ancestor of our own Lafayette—were in a strong position at Beaugé. A little way off lay a body of Scotch under the earl of Buchan, ready to second the French; but the English despised the Scotch even more than they did the French, for they had beaten them oftener and at greater odds.[9]
Clarence did not hesitate to attack the French position. He was received with steadiness; and at the critical moment Buchan and his red-headed crew bore down upon the field. Clarence was slain, and his army defeated.
Henry whose opinion of the disaster was different from that of the English historians, flew back to France, and in the most obstinate of all his campaigns, succeeded in winning back the ground that had been lost. But that campaign which the defeat of Beaugé alone had rendered necessary, was fatal to him. Worn out with care, fatigue and exposure he lay dying at Vincennes.
He called to him his next brother John duke of Bedford, appointed him regent of France, and enjoined upon him always to preserve the friendship and alliance of the duke of Burgundy, as essential to the conquest of the kingdom. He constituted his brother Humphrey regent of England, and adjured him never to leave that island while the war lasted. These two injunctions had the same drift, and showed what was weighing upon Henry’s mind. He had been confident of his own power to obviate the mischief threatened by the English marriage of Jaqueline, but he was not sure his brothers would be equal to it; and the apprehension was not ill founded.
The monarch died and was embalmed and sent to England. He was perhaps the greatest of England’s kings. His chief faults were cruelty and arrogance, and they both stood in his way. Assuming to be king of France he regarded as a traitor worthy of death every Frenchman who resisted him. This theory drove the French into that tenacious defence of their towns which checked his progress; and at the same time his haughty airs alienated the Burgundian nobles. Dare you look me in the face when you speak to me? said he to L’isle Adam, Philip’s governor of Paris. Sire, replied the Burgundian, there lives not the man that I look not in the face when I speak to him.
A few weeks after Henry’s death, his poor crazy father-in-law Charles VI. was laid beside his ancestors in the abbey of Saint Denis. Not a single prince of the House of Valois followed him to his grave. Not a single prince of any blood save the duke of Bedford alone who conducted the obsequies. As they turned away from his tomb, the good monks of the abbey who had sung the requiem, fell into a dispute with the servants of the king’s household about the possession of some ornaments that had been used in the funeral. From words they come to blows, and the battle waxed so fierce that Bedford and his suite were fain to turn back and strike right and left to quell the tumult.
Henry instead of naming one of his brothers guardian and governor of his infant son now king, had conferred that office on his uncle the bishop of Winchester.[10] That bishop is the Cardinal Beaufort of Shakspeare; and we shall now call him by that name though pope Martin had not yet sent him the red hat. These Beauforts were the natural children of John of Gaunt and Catharine Swinford. In the reign of Richard II. John’s nephew, they had been legitimated; but when John’s son Henry usurped the throne, he was fearful of the ambition of his half brothers and caused his parliament to modify the legitimation so far as to exclude them from the throne. The exclusion was futile: the line of Beaufort reigns over England at this present moment, while that of Henry is extinct.
Cardinal Beaufort possessed great abilities but an imperious temper. He and his nephew of Gloucester Jaqueline’s husband were rivals, the one being regent of the king, the other of the kingdom; and this rivalry soon lapsed into a hatred so bitter that they sought only to destroy each other.
The cardinal had raised six thousand men to reinforce Bedford, when Gloucester, exercising his prerogative of regent, assumed the command of them. Then in spite of Henry’s dying injunction that he should not leave England, he took Jaqueline with him and at the head of those troops, landed at Calais. Instead of going south to join Bedford as he had promised, he marched east across the territories of the duke of Burgundy without his permission, and entered upon the provinces of Jaqueline. At their coming the war of the Codfish and the Fishhooks broke out afresh. He and Jaqueline sided with the Fishhooks which gave the Hooks a temporary superiority.
Philip behaved with signal imbecility. Instead of withdrawing his contingent from France, and using it to drive Gloucester out, he expostulated with Bedford concerning the invasion, and clamored for the withdrawal of the English troops. Most gladly would Bedford have withdrawn them, for he needed them himself; but Gloucester was not subject to his authority, and would not listen to him. Philip at last woke up to what everybody else saw, that he was in the predicament of fighting for the English in France and against them in the Netherlands. He levied a fresh army, took the command in person, and marched toward Holland.
When Gloucester heard of these preparations, he wrote Philip a wheedling letter saying that he had come to the continent solely in the interest of Philip and of Philip’s dear double cousin Jaqueline; and he called Heaven to witness to the purity of his intentions. Philip told him he was a liar; Gloucester told Philip he was another. Philip immediately challenged him to mortal combat, declaring that by the help of God and of God’s Virgin Mother our Lady, he would convince him of his error by running him through the body. Gloucester accepted the challenge, vowing to put Philip to death in the name of God, of our Lady and of Monseigneur Saint George. The duke of Bedford and cardinal Beaufort interfered and persuaded these two blusterers to leave the matter out to a council of doctors of law and theology at Paris. These philosophers arrived at the verdict that the two challengers had come out so even in the missives they had discharged at each other that further duelling was superfluous; and so it ended.
Philip entered Holland at the head of his army. The Codfish joined him, not that they preferred him to their lawful suzerain Jaqueline, but because those worthless Fishhooks had adhered to the other side.
At this critical moment Gloucester went back to England, leaving Jaqueline to see to her own affairs as best she might. He was called home he said, by the untoward proceedings of his uncle the cardinal. He sent to Jaqueline however, a reënforcement of three thousand men. The two armies met at Browershaven where after a day of carnage in which Englishman and Frenchman, Fleming and Burgundian, Codfish and Fishhook fell indiscriminately, the star of Philip prevailed. He was not a great general; but in the hour of combat he was an active and intrepid soldier.
Not wholly crushed by this defeat, Jaqueline donned her armor and took the field in person, and in more than one bloody conflict behaved with the steadiness of a veteran. But there was no repairing the disaster of Browershaven, and her fortunes sank. She wrote imploringly to Gloucester to come back to her. One of her letters full of affection, still exists. But they never met again. The good Humphrey had fallen in with a handsome English girl named Eleanor Cobham, and had become more intimate with her than comported with his duty to his Dutch wife.
Philip by the success of his arms and by this infidelity of Gloucester, became master of the fate of Jaqueline. He prayed pope Martin to annul her English marriage and to reinstate the one with the duke of Brabant. Martin consented and put forth a bull accordingly; and as the English marriage had been sanctioned and blessed by his Avignon rival, he let fly at him an anathema so comprehensive that it is doubtful whether he has yet been able, even after the lapse of five centuries, to dodge all its provisions.
As there was reason to fear that Jaqueline still loved her truant Humphrey, the bull in question decreed that if she again espoused him, even after the death of Brabant, she would be guilty of adultery. This at first seems illogical; but the Church is never illogical: admit her premises and you are swept to her conclusions. Let us see: According to the Church, if a woman marries again having a previous husband living, she commits adultery. If Jaqueline after the death of Brabant, should marry Gloucester, she would marry again, having a previous husband living. If you should ask who that previous husband would be, I answer the duke of Gloucester.
At all events, this syllogism was so convincing to Gloucester himself, that like a submissive son of the Church, he turned round and married his mistress Eleanor Cobham.
Nemesis followed up that marriage, and Jaqueline was avenged. A few years later, the duchess Eleanor was arraigned for witchcraft and made to do public penance at Saint Pauls. Humphrey was implicated in his wife’s sorceries; but it would not answer to make a prince of the blood do penance at Saint Pauls, so he was found one morning, dead in his bed.
As for his murderer, stop here O reader! turn to your Shakspeare, Henry VI. part II. act III. scene III.; and stand at the bedside of the dying cardinal—that scene of which Doctor Johnson says “the profound can imagine nothing beyond”—that scene of which Schlegel says “it is beyond praise; no other poet has ever drawn aside the curtain of eternity in so awful a manner”—that scene which John Richard Green says “is taken bodily from some older dramatist!”[11]
The annulment of Jaqueline’s English marriage, threw her back into the arms of the duke of Brabant who however, did not long enjoy the wife thus restored to him. He died, and his estates fell to his brother Philip who died soon after, and so suddenly that Philip of Burgundy who was, or rather claimed to be the next heir, was suspected of having poisoned him. But the fifteenth century had fairly set in, and knowledge had revived. Two intelligent surgeons cut open the dead Philip, to see what ailed him, and found in his stomach an ulcer which sufficiently explained his demise, so that Philip-the-good escaped passing into history as a poisoner.
Jaqueline was reduced to extremities. Philip had cornered her up in Zealand, and set to watch over her a lieutenant of his named Philip Borssele who had risen in his service by his business talents. Jaqueline the inheritor of some of the richest provinces in Europe, was so straitened that she had not money enough to defray her housekeeping. One day her mother had sent her a present of a span of horses, and she could not find a single florin in her purse to give as drink-money to the grooms who had brought them. One of her attendants suggested to her to apply to Borssele who always had money to lend. She spurned the thought of being beholden to that low-born myrmidon of her hated cousin. But finally her necessities prevailed. She sent to Borssele to borrow a small sum. He not only lent it to her but told her he had more at her disposal. Jaqueline was mollified: we are all mollified with a little money and the promise of more. She made up her mind he was not a myrmidon after all but an honest fellow. She admitted him to her presence. Borssele was handsome and graceful; and she did not frown upon him. He took a pliant hour, and though he had never read Othello, he told his tale of love as eloquently as the Moor. They were privately married.
When Philip-the-good heard of this fresh escapade of his double cousin, he flew into a towering passion—or at least, pretended to do so. He stamped and stormed. That Jaqueline of Bavaria, duchess of Brabant, daughter of Burgundy and of France, should stoop to the hand of Philip Borssele! So he seized the bridegroom and shut him up in the castle of Rupelmonde; and thus was Jaqueline deprived of her fourth husband.
But there is reason to believe that Philip-the-good was putting on airs, and that he was secretly glad of the advantage which Jaqueline’s imprudence had given him over her. She had never ceded her estates to him by any formal act: he held them as a brigand holds his prey; but now he brought her to surrender to him her whole patrimony as the ransom of her husband. Borssele was set free, and in order to raise him to a rank a little more commensurate with that of his wife, Philip created him count of Ostravant, and conferred upon him the collar of the Golden Fleece, an order of chivalry which Philip himself had established as a rival to the English order of the Garter; and he settled upon the newly married pair a part of the revenues of Ostravant, so that his double cousin and cousin-in-law might not starve.[12]
We know but little of the remaining years of Jaqueline’s life. We hope they were more tranquil than those we have recounted. She died in 1436, at the age of thirty-five, leaving no issue.
The domains which she had inherited formed technically a part of the Empire Holy and Roman; and at her death the emperor Sigismund claimed that they had escheated to him. The claim was in accordance with feudal law, but Philip was already in possession and was too powerful to be dislodged. Thus did the provinces of Jaqueline go to swell the dominion of the House of Burgundy—that house whose fate it was never to decline after the manner of empires, but to grow in power and splendor under each succeeding duke until the day when Charles-the-rash, son of Philip, should stretch forth his hand to a regal diadem; and then the storm came which swept away both duke and dominion.
The same year that Jaqueline of Bavaria married Philip Borssele, Jaqueline of Luxembourg married the duke of Bedford.
But to introduce our second Jaqueline with due ceremony we must go back ten years; and I promise not to be so long as that in fetching up the arrears of my story.
After the death of Henry V. his brother of Bedford was at first desirous to obey the injunction of the dying king, to keep on good terms with the duke of Burgundy. There had been love passages, ardent no doubt, but still diplomatic only between Bedford and Anne of Burgundy Philip’s sister, a comely maiden of eighteen. Bedford pressed his suit and was accepted, and Anne made him a good wife, at least in a political sense, for her kind offices were often required to keep peace between her arrogant husband and her obstinate brother.
Bedford was endowed with all the haughtiness of his brother Henry without his genius; and he affected to treat Philip as his inferior which he certainly was not. The House of Valois descended in direct male line from Hugh Capet, had nothing to yield to the House of Plantagenet whose highest male descent was from the counts of Anjou vassals of the line of Capet. Besides, duke Philip was an hereditary sovereign, while duke John of Bedford was only regent of a kingdom not yet achieved, and not destined to be achieved.
On one occasion, in the presence of both English and Burgundian nobles, Bedford so far forgot himself as to threaten that if his brother Philip did not behave, he would send him to England to drink more beer than he liked. This was a gross affront. Philip had been brought up on the delicious wines of his native Burgundy; and he detested beer. But the good duchess Anne interposed and persuaded her husband not to make her brother drink beer, and peace was maintained.
After nine years of married life Anne died. This event might not have dissolved the alliance between the two powers, had not Bedford conducted himself with a wanton disregard to Philip’s sensibilities. Among the vassals of the House of Burgundy the most illustrious was a branch of that of Luxembourg; and the gentlemen of that house were among the most ardent partisans of the English cause. It was John of Luxembourg into whose hands the maid of Orleans had fallen after her capture at Compiegne. John took her to his castle of Beaurevoir where she was received with kindness by the ladies of his house, especially by his young niece Jaqueline of Saint Pol, or of Luxembourg.
The high rank and eminent services of this family had brought them into social relations with the regent Bedford; and Anne of Burgundy was no sooner in her grave than he offered his hand to Jaqueline. And so promptly did they dispatch the business that it might be said of that as of another occasion well known to you, that the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Jaqueline of Luxembourg was Philip’s vassal, and by feudal law, had no right to marry without his consent, but he was not even consulted. This disrespect to the memory of his dead sister, and contempt of his own authority exhausted his patience. He had long had his head broken at home over his English alliance. His eldest sister had married Arthur of Brittany, count of Richmont, Constable of France. His next sister was the wife of the count of Clermont afterwards duke of Bourbon. Both these gentlemen were partisans of king Charles. Philip who as we have said, was good-tempered, had kept on friendly terms with his sisters, though their husbands would now and then burst into his territories and lay them waste; and he now empowered those fighting brothers-in-law to open negotiations in his name with the king.
Cardinal Beaufort—we have anticipated in referring to his death-bed—Cardinal Beaufort made a strenuous effort to turn aside the peril. He induced Philip and Bedford to agree to a personal interview, and they went to Saint Omer for that purpose. But a question of precedence arose: neither of them would pay the other the first visit. In vain did the cardinal represent to Bedford that it was he who had given the cause of offence, and it was he who had everything to lose by the rupture. The self-willed Plantagenet would concede nothing. The cardinal then tried Philip, calling him his dear nephew.[13] But the Burgundian’s blood was up and he was as intractable as the Englishman. So the two princes left St. Omer without seeing each other.
The envoys of the king of France and of the duke of Burgundy met in the church of Saint Vaast in the town of Arras. Cardinal Beaufort took part in the conference on behalf of England; and the cardinal of Santa Croce on the part of the Roman pontiff. In an eloquent speech Beaufort pleaded in the name of that Church of which he was a prince, that Philip could renounce his alliance with England only at the cost of his salvation. He had taken an oath, and if he broke that oath his soul was lost. On the contrary the cardinal of Santa Croce maintained that Philip’s first and greatest sublunary duty was to his liege lord king Charles, and if he were recreant to that duty he would be damned. And to prove that it was he and not the English cardinal who spoke by the authority of the Church, he wrought a miracle on the spot. They brought to him a consecrated wafer—the BREAD that the hand of the priest had transformed into the very substance of the Omnipotent. He cursed it, and it turned black; he blessed it and it turned white again.
This was beyond gainsaying. Beaufort withdrew; and the treaty of Arras was signed, in which Philip dictated nearly his own terms. Among other concessions Charles agreed to build an expiatory chapel at Montereau where John-the-fearless had been murdered, and to maintain there daily low mass for the repose of his soul. Not a word about John’s victim the equally murdered Louis of Orleans the king’s uncle. His soul was left to shift for itself without diplomatic succor. Time once more vindicated its reputation for putting things to rights. Before the century was out the generation of Charles VII. was extinct; and that of the neglected Louis mounted the throne and sat there till the end.[14]
The defection of the duke of Burgundy resulted as Henry V. had foreseen: it rendered hopeless the Plantagenet cause in France. But indeed the tide had already turned, and the remnant of the kingdom left to Charles VII. had suddenly shown itself a match for its enemies. The superstitious spirit of the age attributed this change to the direct interposition of Providence in the advent and career of Jeanne Darc the famous Maid of Orleans; and the English have seemed willing to leave this coloring upon it in order to throw a mist over some of the most unfortunate passages of their military history. The true explanation like most true explanations, is simple enough. There had sprung up around the falling throne of Charles an array of military talent not equalled elsewhere. Charles VII. was not a great king, but so fortunate was he in making use of the greatness of others that he gained the name of Charles-the-well-served. Foremost among those to whom he owed that title, was his cousin the count Dunois called in the early part of his career and in Shakspeare, the Bastard of Orleans.
So little can be gathered in English histories concerning this great man, that I will say a word more about him. Louis of Orleans, the husband of Valentina, was not true to her. An intrigue with the wife of the lord of Canny, resulted in the birth of a boy. Why the mother did not take charge of her offspring I do not know; but it is certain that Valentina herself adopted this by-blow of her husband, and brought him up with her own little brood. It is even said that he was her favorite among them, from his singular wit and spirit. After having tried many years in vain to bring the lordly assassin of her husband to justice, Valentina lay on her death-bed. She called her children to her side; she called to him who was not her child, but whom she loved as well; and she told him that he above them all was chosen to be the avenger of his father. But Heaven had marked out for him a higher rôle than to avenge an unworthy sire. It was he who was ever at the side of the Maid of Orleans eking out her inspiration with his own, and at times setting aside the mandates she received from above, in favor of the suggestions of his own genius; and then with true magnanimity ascribing to her all the glory of the success.
After the capture of the Maid, the renown of Dunois, no longer obscured by the cloud of superstition in which he himself had been willing to envelop it, shone forth with its proper splendor.
Bedford, after having hacked the spurs off the heels of one of his bravest captains, because he had lost the battle of Patay, took the field himself against Dunois; and at Lagni was forced to abandon to him his cannon and his baggage. Subsequently Dunois was made lieutenant general of France.
The hundred years war ended by the dismemberment not of the French empire but of the English. The vast continental domains of the Plantagenets, the inheritance of Eleanor of Aquitaine, containing nearly one-third of France, which they had held three centuries—as long indeed as they had held the throne of England—were all conquered and annexed to the French crown. Nothing remained but the town of Calais which however was not a part of Eleanor’s patrimony.
This was the severest blow England ever received: it reduced her to a second class power, and left to her kings hardly more territory than they had inherited from their Saxon predecessors. In treating of this great war, English historians with some exceptions, strive to make nothing conspicuous but English victories; and the thoughtful reader is puzzled at the result, if indeed the result is disclosed to him. Well, let him admire the patriotism of the English writers and look elsewhere.
But the Jaquelines! We have tried to explain how they were a cause, albeit a minor one, of this outcome, by the dissention which the love affairs of both fomented between the Plantagenets and the Burgundian Valois. A major cause was the soldiership of Dunois and his companions in arms.[15]
Three years after his marriage with Jaqueline of Luxembourg, the duke of Bedford, worn out like his brother Henry, with care and toil, died at Rouen, leaving his widow childless. Her further history demands that we go back two years.
Near the town of Beauvais there was a dilapidated castle called Gerberoy. In the neighborhood were hovering La Hire and Saintrailles two of the hardest fighters in the service of king Charles. Bedford feared that these gentlemen might seize Gerberoy and make it tenable, so he despatched one of his captains the earl of Arundel to intercept them. Arundel was approaching Gerberoy without having discovered any signs of the enemy; and there was apparently nothing to apprehend from a ruinous old stronghold which could not contain half as many men as he had at his back. Nevertheless like a prudent general he sent forward Sir Ralph Standish with a hundred men to reconnoitre. Sir Ralph arrived under the walls, and observing a soldier on the parapet, summoned him to surrender. The soldier answered with a gibe, and the next moment Sir Ralph and his hundred men were flying for their lives. La Hire and Saintrailles had thrown themselves into the place in the night with a corps of picked men. Not content with putting to flight Sir Ralph, they instantly fell upon the main body of the English which according to Hume, was five times their number. Arundel was slain and his detachment routed.
Among the prisoners taken, was an English knight named Richard Woodville, and it is on this occasion, I believe, that he makes his début on the page of history. He had fought with blind and misdirected valor in the battle, and so had other knights whose names have not come down to us. His name would not have spanned such a distance had it not been his fate to become the father of the long line of kings referred to in the beginning of this essay; nor is that the only royal line that traces descent from him.
He soon recovered his liberty and entered the personal service of the duke of Bedford as a sort of staff officer, and had frequent occasions to admire the charming duchess. After Bedford’s death Sir Richard ventured to lift his eyes to the widowed Jaqueline. Like Borssele he was handsome; and Jaqueline of Luxembourg took a leaf out of the book of Jaqueline of Bavaria, and became the bride of Sir Richard Woodville.
Their daughter was that Elizabeth Woodville, lady Grey who came and knelt before Edward IV. and prayed that he would lift from her and her children the attainder that had fallen upon them because her husband had perished at Saint Albans, fighting for the House of Lancaster. Edward granted her prayer, fell in love with her and married her. Their daughter was Elizabeth Plantagenet who became the queen of Henry VII.
One more love story is needed to complete the mosaic. Catharine of France widow of Henry V., became enamoured of what one English historian calls “an obscure Welch gentleman named Owen Tudor.” This was the gravest misalliance of all. Catharine of Valois, daughter of a king, sister of a king, widow of a king, mother of a king, stooped to be the wife of an obscure country gentleman. Their son Edmund Tudor, married Margaret Beaufort of the Beaufort family already mentioned. The son of Edmund Tudor and Margaret Beaufort was Henry earl of Richmond who seized the crown as the prize of his victory at Bosworth, and then strengthened his claim to it by marrying Elizabeth Plantagenet, Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV. and grand daughter of Jaqueline.
Thus did the blood of Beaufort come to the throne; and thus were Jaqueline of Luxembourg and her true knight the progenitors of the line which Macbeth said would stretch out to the crack of doom.
(The italics mark the line of descent.)
Charles-le-temeraire, Charles-the-rash, miscalled by the English, Charles-the-bold, was the last Valois duke of Burgundy. He left an only child Mary of Burgundy who married Maximilian of Hapsburg, afterward emperor. Their son was the Archduke Philip who is counted as Philip the first of Spain though he never reigned. Philip married Joanna daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and sister of Catharine of Aragon wife of Henry VIII. The son of Philip and Joanna was the great emperor Charles-the-fifth who was Charles the first of Spain. The crown of Spain then fell from father to son, to Philip II., Philip III., Philip IV. and Charles II. where the male line of the elder branch of Hapsburg ended. The crown then fell to Philip V. (Bourbon), grandson of Louis XIV. and Maria Teresa eldest daughter of Philip IV.
The younger, the Austrian branch of the House of Hapsburg, is descended from the emperor Ferdinand brother of Charles-the-fifth.
MANY years ago I knew a Frenchman whose father a captain of infantry, had been killed in La Vendée fighting under Hoche. He had many things to tell me about Hoche which interested me in his career, and led me to treasure up in my memory whatever I came across afterwards concerning him.
There was a certain confidential air about the communications of my French friend, which leads me to say to the reader that I trust to his honor not to divulge what I say to him touching the warrior in question.
The French themselves hold that next to Napoleon Bonaparte, the most brilliant soldier thrown to the surface by the revolution, was Lazarus Hoche. This seems too to be the opinion of a writer in the Encyclopedia Brittanica who says that the death of Hoche deprived the French people of the only man capable of making head against the ambition of the Corsican. And it still adds force to that view to bear in mind how short a time was allotted him to win immortality: he never lived to be thirty. Indeed I remember but one general in history who died so young with so high a reputation; and that was that wondrous boy Gaston de Foix nephew of Louis XII., who fell at the age of twenty-three at Ravenna after having there as elsewhere totally overthrown the famous Spanish infantry.
Perhaps some honest reader still callow from the study of John Richard Green, may remind me that that unique historian not only makes the Spanish infantry triumphant at Ravenna, but cites it as their typical exploit. Well, we must be thankful that Mr. Green does not cite the Caudine Forks as the typical exploit of the Roman legions.
Lazarus Hoche was born near Versailles in June 1768. He was the son, not of a common workman as some of the encyclopedias do vainly talk, but of a common soldier, or rather of an uncommon soldier; for his father on account of his uncommonness, was taken from the line and made keeper of the royal kennels at Versailles; and the first useful occupation of the boy, if useful it were, was to help his father in the care of the king’s hounds.
Nature had endowed him with a handsome and vigorous body and a precocious intellect. He had a maternal uncle who was curé of Saint Germain-en-laye and a man of some learning. This good priest interested himself in the education of his clever nephew, and taught him the elements of latin and mathematics; and thus he received instruction beyond what was common in his station in life. And you academical gentlemen will insist I suppose, that his subsequent advancement was all owing to this latin and mathematics.
But his instincts were military and he resolved to be a soldier, and with a boyish longing at the same time, to see the world, he enlisted when he was sixteen in what he supposed to be a regiment bound for the Indies; but his friends had played a trick on him, and he found himself enrolled in a home regiment. He made the best of it however, and soon attracted the attention of his superiors by his prompt and intelligent observance of duty.
But there were some exceptions to his good behavior. On one occasion a soldier of his regiment had been killed in a pot-house brawl. Hoche joined with some of his comrades in razing to the ground the house of the assassin. For his share in this riot he was condemned to three months imprisonment. Another act of violence which cost the life of a fellow being, brought him no punishment whatever, as it was within the tolerance of the service. A corporal was noted for his skill in handling the sabre. He had already slain two opponents in his duels. He insulted Hoche who instantly challenged him. Hoche received a cut across the forehead, which nearly split his skull, and left a long deep scar there the rest of his days; but he put an end to the duelling of his antagonist by running him through the body.
Of his personal comeliness it is related that once, on parade, a noble lady pointed him out to her companion and exclaimed: What a splendid looking general that would make! She little knew she was playing the part of a prophetess.
And it was not long before his fine bearing stood him in still better stead. Near by was a regiment of grenadiers of the king’s guard. These superb fellows had noticed the soldier-like qualities of Hoche, and they petitioned that he might be enrolled among them. The petition was granted.
These men when in barracks, were allowed to earn money by any honest industry that did not interfere with their duty, and Hoche addicted himself to embroidery. If you think this an effeminate occupation for a soldier, I would remind those of you who have been to sea in a sailing ship, that you must have observed that sailors who are certainly as rough as soldiers, are often skillful in needle work useful and ornamental.
With the money Hoche earned in this manner, he bought books, especially books of history; and as he dwelt upon the renown of Hannibal and of Caesar, of Turenne and Condé, of Marlborough and of Frederic, it was his dream to write his own name some day on that immortal list, I say dream, for it could be nothing more then, under the old régime when the command of armies was the prerogative of the nobility alone.
In 1789 occurred the first overt act of the French revolution—the storming of the Bastille. It was the same year that George Washington was inaugurated first president of the United States. The end of our revolution was the beginning of that of the people of France, and ours precipitated theirs. It was high time perhaps that the old régime came to an end; but we Americans ought none the less look back upon it with gratitude. Without its aid we could not have compassed our independence. It was the troops sent us by Louis XVI. that offset the German forces that came here in aid of our enemies.
Hoche was too well informed not to understand the issue between the government and the people, and he believed in his heart that the people were right; but he was the sworn soldier of the king and he was determined to defend him so long as defence was possible. He was present at Versailles when the Parisian mob worthily led by that frail beauty Théroigne de Méricourt broke into the chateau and made the king come out on the balcony with the cap of liberty on his head. Hoche stood there shoulder to shoulder with his comrades ready to charge upon the rabble the moment the signal was given. But the signal was never given: Louis XVI. was the best of men and the worst of kings: He had not the heart to shed the blood of his subjects, so they shed his blood.
Legend says there was also there on that occasion another young man of still rarer qualities, who whispered to a companion that the king was an imbecile not to order those fine guards to slaughter the vagabonds and put an end to the disturbance. The anecdote may not be true, but it is none the less characteristic: it is perhaps the reflex of what that young man himself did a few years later.
The king was led to Paris and kept virtually a captive in the Tuileries, and Hoche with his regiment passed under the command of La Fayette whose purpose was not to overthrow the monarchy but to reform it on a constitutional basis. But the French revolution was different from ours: ours was aristocratic, a change at the head only, still retaining remnants of feudal tyranny—such for example as the divine right of sovereigns not to pay their debts—which we are not yet emancipated enough to throw off. Theirs on the contrary was democratic, or rather volcanic, the very dregs from the bottom thrown to the top.
La Fayette was obliged to fly for his life; and the army went over and fraternised as it was called, with the populace. The rise of Hoche was now rapid. Beside courage he was gifted with a thoughtful self-possession which never failed him. The display of this virtue on an occasion when he covered the retreat of a beaten army, attracted the notice of Carnot the minister of war—“the organiser of victory” as he was called—and he made Hoche a brigadier general.
In 1792 the supreme authority of France was usurped by a body known as the Convention. In 1793 the king was brought to the block, and all Europe rose to avenge his death. The English government had fitted out an army under the command of the duke of York, son of George III., to cooperate with the allied enemies of the new republic. York was a methodical soldier, and minding the old rule not to leave a hostile stronghold in the rear, he turned aside to besiege Dunkirk in the north-east corner of France, instead of hastening south. Carnot caught at the fault of the Englishman and put it to profit. He ordered Hoche to throw himself into Dunkirk with a few battallions and hold it to the last extremity. Hoche found the defences in bad condition and the inhabitants who were a conglomeration of various nationalities, not in the least disposed to aid him in repairing them. He seized the chief magistrate and threw him into prison, and warned the other functionaries that they would be sent to join him, if they did not come up to his help against the English. They came; and by the time the duke had established his lines of circumvallation with scientific skill, Hoche and his men were prepared to do all that was expected of them, namely, to keep the duke of York out of mischief for some time to come. One day the sound of cannon was heard off south, and soon the English were observed to be preparing to quit. Hoche though shut in from outward news, penetrated the situation. An allied army under Freytag coming up from the south-east, and a French army under Houchard coming up from the south-west, had intercepted each other and given battle. The English had received a message from Freytag, notifying them to come to the aid of their friends. Hoche resolved that they should do nothing of the sort. He sallied out upon them, threw them into some disorder and thus detained them till the battle of Hondschoote was lost and won. Houchard victorious pushed for Dunkirk. The English, hindered by this fresh sortie of Hoche, came tardily and faultily into order of battle, and after a short struggle, broke and fled leaving their artillery and their baggage.
Hoche shared with Houchard the glory of this double victory. The conduct of the duke of York was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry in which he was duly whitewashed as became a prince of the blood. Had he been a commoner he might have shared the fate of Admiral Byng.[16]
Carnot showed anew his appreciation of Hoche by giving him the command of the army of the Moselle—a grave responsibility for a youth of twenty-five; and Carnot made the mistake of not letting the responsibility rest squarely upon his shoulders: he sent commissioners to direct him.
An allied army superior in force and in a strong position, under the duke of Brunswick, lay at Keyserslautern. The commissioners counselled an attack. Hoche though daring was not rash, and the born instinct of the soldier within him whispered that the risk was too great; so he hesitated. The commissioners insisted, and he led forward his troops. The battle lasted two days, and never perhaps was the genius of the young general more conspicuous. Repulsed, he marched his men off the field as he had marched them on—shoulder to shoulder, beaten but not demoralized, and the enemy did not follow him up.
Carnot was sufficiently just not to blame him for this failure. On the contrary he sent him reënforcements, and he sent him also what he would willingly have dispensed with—fresh commissioners to advise him. Hoche had pondered deeply the cause of his defeat, and had resolved that that cause should not again operate. He refused to consult with the commissioners: he would neither tell them his own plans nor listen to theirs. Taking off his cap and shaking it in their faces in that dramatic style so very French, he exclaimed: If that cap knew my thoughts I would throw it in the fire! Finding him obdurate they went back to Paris and made no favorable report of him.
Hoche had under him at this time several officers of about his own age who afterwards made their mark in history: Moreau the victor of Hohenlinden, who fell at last at Dresden fighting against France; Ney the bravest of the brave. Desaix who came late but not too late on the field of Marengo, and died at the head of his column; Le Fèvre the hero of the 18. Brumaire when he scattered the council of the five hundred with his grenadiers, and saved Bonaparte; Soult who won his baton of marshal by piercing the Russian centre at Austerlitz. He distinguished himself afterwards in Spain; and what is a more interesting distinction for you esthetic gentlemen, he sold to the French government for 615,000 francs—the highest price ever paid for a picture—the sublime Murillo of the Louvre. And I am sorry I cannot tell you how he came by it: there was scandal thereunto anent.
It is probable that Hoche imparted his plans to these able lieutenants, for it is otherwise inexplicable that they should have acquiesced in the strange measures he adopted. Instead of seeking the enemy, he took every pains to avoid him. He blew up the bridges and tore up the roads; and the allies seeing him bent on defensive measures only, failed to watch him as he deserved. And there were disquieting rumors in Paris. Hoche was certainly not a coward, but was he not a traitor? Had he not sold himself for Austrian gold? Such things had been.
One day the news came that he and his army had disappeared in the night. Perhaps they had gone over to the enemy; for the atmosphere was charged with treachery, and men were daily changing their politics with the changing fortune of war. The next news of Hoche was that he had fallen as if from the clouds, upon a strong Austrian position the other side of the Vosges mountains. And the position was so strong too that for a moment he was in danger of a second repulse. A battery on a height made such havoc with his men that they quailed. Six hundred francs a piece for those cannon! cried he, pointing with his sword. It is a bargain replied one of his officers. You shall judge between us added another as they clambered up. The battery was taken; and the Austrians fell back on the Prussian position at Sultz where their joint forces awaited the coming of the French. They did not wait long and their defeat was total.
The victory was as important as decisive. The purpose of the allied army there was to prevent the junction of Hoche and Pichegru, the latter commanding the army of the Rhine. That junction now took place. According to military rule Pichegru the older man and the older officer outranked Hoche and was entitled to the chief command; but the Convention, dazzled by the brilliancy with which Hoche had redeemed his reputation decreed that he should have the precedence, and Pichegru after some protest consented to serve under his boy superior.
The allies had withdrawn behind the fortifications of Landau and Wissembourg, and so long as they were there the French frontier was infested and nothing permanent accomplished. Hoche resolved to dislodge them. He told his troops he had a bloody task for them: They must storm Landau! They responded by waving their caps and shouting Landau ou la mort, Landau or death! And it was no idle boast: Amid a scene of sickening carnage Landau was taken and the allies disheartened did not wait for that terrible forlorn hope to mount to the breach at Wissembourg.
The frontier was thus cleared of enemies, and the Republic set free to follow up that spasmodic career of conquest which brought for a moment the continent to her feet.
Hoche now took it into his head to get married, though we cannot imagine how he could stop fighting long enough to attend to anything so sentimental. Perhaps he did not object to variety in his fighting. He had met at Thionville a graceful girl who had strongly attracted him. On inquiry he learned that her character was as commendable as her manners, and he offered her his hand. Her family though respectable was not wealthy, and through diffidence she hesitated. What was she that the first soldier of France should pick her out! But her friends would not let her miss such a chance, and they were married; and I leave you to the chronicles which aver that she made him a good wife.
At any other epoch of the history of France, and at any epoch whatever of the history of any other people, a young general who had encircled his name with so much glory, would have been the idol of the nation; but France had fallen upon strange lines. The Reign of Terror was at its height; the Convention had turned upon itself; the Girondists, republicans all, had gone to the scaffold; Danton the rival of Robespierre, had fallen; and that sanguinary triumvirate Robespierre, Saint Just and Couthon were the arbiters of life and death to all so unfortunate as to live under the aegis of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
It is necessary to consider a moment the state of things under the Terror, in order to make the rest of this story credible. Lamartine, a republican himself, says: “More than eight thousand suspects encumbered the prisons. In one night three hundred families the most notable in France, historical, military, parliamentary, episcopal, were arrested. No crimes were invented for them: they were guilty by the quarter they lived in, by their rank, their fortune, their relations, their religion, their opinions, their presumed opinions. One died for having said what he thought; another for having held his tongue; one for having emigrated and come back; another for having staid at home; one for having increased the public distress by not spending his income; another for having insulted the public distress by spending it too lavishly. In a word there were no longer any innocent or any guilty: there were only the proscribers and the proscribed.”
Under this fearful régime many of the truest and bravest soldiers of France had perished: the duke of Lauzun and Biron who had fought for us under Washington and La Fayette; the count d’Estaing who at the same time commanded the French fleet off our coast; Custine the victor of Mayence, and strangest of all, Houchard the victor of Honschoote. La Fayette had saved himself by flight; so had Dumouriez the victor of Jemappes. Some of these were proscribed because they were of noble birth; others because, though plebeian and republican, they did not fully come up to the standard of fanaticism then in vogue.
Robespierre and Saint Just are two of the monsters of history; yet we cannot doubt that they were animated by what they regarded as devoted and unselfish patriotism. They were as ready to lay down their own lives as to take the lives of others, and they did lay them down.
They were among the best illustrations of that saying of Gibbon that fanaticism can turn the noblest natures into beasts of prey.
Hoche had lost much of the friendship of Carnot by flouting his authority in the matter of the commissioners, and by setting up on his own account as an “organiser of victory.” Robespierre looked upon all great warriors as a menace to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; and since the campaign of Wissembourg, Hoche was regarded as the first of living generals. He had moreover been approached by the royalists with the same temptation that was afterwards spread before Bonaparte, namely, that he should undertake the rôle of General Monk, and if he succeeded, the lofty function of Constable of France was to be revived for him. He had scorned these offers; yet with the perversity of human nature especially of human nature under the Terror, he was held accountable for their having been made.
The Convention resolved to arrest him before he became too strong for them. But did they dare seize him at the head of the troops he had led and who adored him? The Terrorists had not only General Monk to reflect upon but the case at their own doors of Dumouriez. When they had sent commissioners to arrest that officer in his camp, he had ordered a file of soldiers to seize them and deliver them over to the enemy.[17]
Hoche was a spirit of higher stamp than Dumouriez. Might he not improve on the methods of that captain, and march at once on Paris? So they thought best to use indirection: they lavished eulogies upon him, and invited him to lay down his present command and accept that of the army of Italy—a force just levied for the invasion of the Italian provinces of the House of Austria. He readily consented to the change, for that invasion was a favorite idea of his own. The Convention named to succeed him in the place he was vacating, Jourdan who justified their choice the next year by gaining the victory of Fleurus.
Hoche was completing the preparations for the campaign which another and a greater was to lead, when a warrant came for his arrest. He made no resistance. Perhaps resistance was useless; perhaps he considered obedience a paramount duty; perhaps he trusted in his star and believed they would not dare put him to death, and his star did not mislead him. He was taken to Paris. Robespierre and Saint Just were in favor of his immediate execution, but Couthon either from prudence or a worthy purpose to save Hoche, pleaded that it might not be well to sacrifice that young hero with such laurels on his brow—the people might not take it in good part; and that it would be safer to keep him in custody till time and the victories of others had dimmed the lustre of his reputation. So he was put into the prison of the Concièrgerie.
To do the Terrorists justice they were not disposed to treat their prisoners with any other cruelty than to cut their heads off; and Hoche was allowed the consolation of writing to his wife and of receiving her letters. He was soon joined by a young man named Thoiras of whose imprisonment he was the innocent cause. Thoiras was a friend of the family of Madame Hoche, and had expressed indignation at Hoche’s arrest.
To be imprisoned was to be condemned to die. No trial, no examination; but every evening the Committee of Public Safety went over the list, and marked off chiefly at random, as many as could be guillotined on the morrow; and this fatal roll was read aloud each morning, in the different prisons.
One day the name of Thoiras was called. He bade farewell to Hoche, and drew from his pocket a watch which he begged him to keep for his sake. That watch is still in the family of Hoche. That is to say, the last I know of it, it belonged to the Marchioness of Roye, Hoche’s daughter; but that lady was born about a century ago.
Among other interesting prisoners whose acquaintance Hoche made in the Concièrgerie, were two young and charming widows whose fate proved different from what was then threatened. One of them, instead of having her head cut off by the guillotine, was to have it encircled by a diadem. It was Josephine de Beauharnais. The other was already a passive agent in a plot for the overthrow of the Terror. We shall say more about her presently.
As fast as prisoners were led out to execution others were brought in to take their places; and who might be the new comers was a daily subject of mournful curiosity to those already incarcerated. One day there were ushered into the Concièrgerie three men who caused great amazement. Two were recognized as Saint Just and Couthon. The third had his face bound up with a bloody napkin, but it was soon whispered about that it was none other than the terrible Robespierre himself.
The tale has been told a thousand times: perhaps you will listen to it the thousand and first time. One of the youngest and ablest members of the Convention was Jean Lambert Tallien. He was not a good man: his hand was as blood-stained as the rest. He had clamored for the death of the king, and for the death of his co-republicans the Girondists. He had seconded Danton in the massacres of September. He had recently been sent to Bordeaux to see that the Terror was duly administered there, and that an adequate number of heads fell daily in the market-place, and he had fulfilled his mission with diabolical fidelity.
There lived in Bordeaux at that time one Madame de Fontenay whose beauty Balzac says was one of Nature’s masterpieces. This was the second of the two young widows whom Hoche had met in prison. I have called her a widow but she was not quite that: she was a divorced woman. Her husband who was a nobleman and a royalist had emigrated, that is, had fled from the guillotine and from such fellows as Tallien. The republic had decreed that a wife who was patriotic enough to stay behind under such circumstances, should be entitled to a divorce; and Madame de Fontenay who loved her country better than she loved her husband, had availed herself of this law, and was now free. But her name was aristocratic and her friends respectable, and in the daily increasing barbarity of the Terror she was in great danger. As fearless and capable as she was beautiful she resolved to meet the peril half way. She paid a visit to Tallien and pleaded her cause so eloquently that he assured her of his protection. He went back to Paris, but he could not get out of his head the vision of that appealing, resistless woman. He wrote to her and she wrote back. He urged her to come to Paris so that he might befriend her more effectually, and she came.
This virtuous passion seemed to work a change in that bad man. He determined to shed no more blood; he began to hang back in the hellish path of the Convention. Robespierre looked askance at him and soon became an unfriend. Thinking to provoke Tallien to some rash act that would afford a pretext for sending him to the guillotine, Robespierre seized Madame de Fontenay and threw her in prison. Well, it did provoke Tallien to a rash act, but it was not he who went to the guillotine. He became the chief of a conspiracy for the destruction of the triumvirate. He was urged forward by two of the strongest of motives: to save his own life and to save the life of the woman he loved. The plot spread, for every member of the Convention who differed in opinion even unwittingly from Robespierre, was in danger of the scaffold.
On the evening of the 8th. Thermidor a month that embraced a part of July and August, the conspirators held council. It was resolved that in the session of the morrow Tallien should lead the attack on Robespierre; and the rest swore by all they held sacred which was not much, to back him to the death.
The ninth Thermidor—day big with fate—epoch in the history of the revolution—dawned. The Convention assembled. Tallien gained the tribune. He was an impressive speaker, and when he had fixed the attention of the assembly he proceeded first to comment on the acts of the triumvirate, then to criticise, then to call in question, then to condemn, then to denounce. It was now his life or theirs and he hurled defiance at them.
When he had done, Robespierre rose. He was evidently taken aback by this unexpected arraignment. He made a feeble reply in which he dilated on his own devotion to the public cause and on the heinousness of the traitors who were turning against him. He then looked around for the usual response: Vive la République! Vive Robespierre! Not a word. There was dead silence. Presently a voice was heard: A bas les tyrans, down with the tyrants! The cry was echoed and reëchoed. Tallien saw the hour was come. He ordered the guards to arrest Robespierre, Saint Just and Couthon. The soldiers seeing the triumvirs still calmly seated could not believe that three men just now all powerful could be condemned, and they hesitated. The order was repeated not only by Tallien but by an outcry of his backers who were now a multitude; and the guards led them forth. They took them first to the palace of the Luxembourg where Robespierre seeing that all was lost, drew a pistol and attempted to kill himself, but he took aim so badly that the ball merely broke his jaw and went out at the opposite cheek. Hence the bloody napkin.
They were condemned to death by the same Committee of Public Safety which a few days before was their pliant tool of assassination.
It was the end. The Reign of Terror was over, and all political prisoners were set free. It was thus that Hoche and Josephine and Madame de Fontenay recovered their liberty.
I suppose you ladies will not let me off from the rest of the love affairs of that fascinating dame and Tallien. Well, they were married, and Madame Tallien was one of the queens of beauty and fashion under the Directory the Consulate and the Empire. It was in her drawing room that Bonaparte first met Josephine. After he became emperor he quarrelled with Madame Tallien. She was too witty and had too little reverence for the demi-god; so he would no longer let Josephine associate with her old friend and fellow prisoner.
Tallien lived to be old. In his last years he was supported by a small pension granted him by Louis XVIII. whose brother Tallien had done to death. Such was the vengeance of the House of Bourbon. And it was another prince of that house who brought from Saint Helena the remains of the arch-enemy of his race, and placed them in that superb tomb under the dome of the Invalids. Contrast this with what the English restoration did with the Regicides and with the remains of Cromwell.
The greatest of French rulers sleeps in the most gorgeous mausoleum of modern times: the greatest of English rulers—Where is his grave?
Hoche was no sooner out of prison than the Committee of Public Safety who had been asking themselves day after day whether the time had come to send him to the guillotine, gave him a new command. This time it was one he would fain have shrunk from; for he was to draw his sword against Frenchmen. In the west of France was the new Department of La Vendée. The inhabitants were rural in their occupations and primitive in their manners. They were devoted Roman Catholics and consequently devoted royalists. Many priests flying for their lives from Liberty, Equality and Fraternity had taken refuge among them, and had strengthened their fealty to the old régime. The Vendéeans had risen in arms against the Republic, and the insurrection had extended to neighboring Departments. Such was the valor of the men and the skill of their leaders that they had thus far repulsed every force sent against them. Even Kléber afterwards the victor of Heliopolis, had been defeated and driven back. France face to face with Europe in arms, could hardly survive with this ulcer in her bosom: it was therefore her best soldier that she now chose to deal with it. Hoche set about the task with characteristic energy. He made no mistakes, he suffered no defeats and at the end of a sanguinary campaign La Vendée was pacificated, that is, was turned into a desert.
It is illustrative of the imbecility with which this European war upon France was for some years carried on, that no adequate effort was made to take advantage of this revolt of the Vendéeans. The only important attempt to second them was the expedition to Quiberon Bay. A small force of emigrants, that is of French royalists were conveyed to that bay by an English fleet. They landed and fortified their position; and as it was commanded by the English guns, they felt themselves safe till they could form junction with the insurgents. But they had counted without their host, that is without Hoche; and almost before they thought he could be aware of their coming, his troops were scaling their defenses. The affair was soon over, and but few of the invaders escaped. What added to the carnage was that the guns of the English fleet played the while upon the scene of action, mowing down with cynical impartiality friend and foe alike. The English commander no doubt felt that every man laid low was one Frenchman the less, and how could he send ashore first to ascertain his politics?
It was toward the close of Hoche’s campaign in La Vendée that another campaign more notable was in progress on the eastern frontier. Let us take a glance at the chain of events that caused this campaign to be so remarkable.
The Convention was not an adequate government for a great people, but it was better than none. Such however was not the opinion of the socialists and communists and anarchists who swarmed in Paris, and had gained control of the Sections, that is of the ward-meetings. These philosophers held that the best government was the one that governed the least, and therefore an ideal government was one that did not govern at all. They rose to suppress the Convention, so that every man might be a law unto himself, and Liberty, Equality and Fraternity do their perfect work. The crisis was alarming: the Convention appealed for protection to General Barras the military head of Paris. Barras had under him an artillery officer full of original ideas. This was the young man already referred to as having been at Versailles when the mob broke into the palace, and as having called the king an imbecile for not ordering his guards to use their bayonets. Among his other excellences this young gentleman was handsome. We have said that Hoche was handsome, but their respective success in the path of beauty, was different. Hoche was tall and of martial aspect. This other Apollo was small of stature and had the features and the hands and the feet of a good-looking girl. Nevertheless he was not a favorite with the ladies. He had ways they did not like. When they talked he would not listen as he ought, and as we all ought, but would look off into vacancy as if rapt in thought; and they were malicious enough to say that he was rapt in thought—the thought of his own attractions; and considering the complex character of the man it is not impossible the ladies were right. With men however he stood better. Few could come in contact with him without feeling his influence, and Barras was often led by him. To him then he had recourse in the threatened peril. The young officer planted cannon in different parts of the town under lieutenants of his own mettle, and himself took charge of a few pieces in the street Saint Honoré at the corner where stands the church Saint Roch. The insurgents came swarming up. He gave them no warning of what was in store for them but waited till they were within range, and then let drive into them a pitiless storm of grape-shot. The pavement was strewed with the dead and dying. Revolt had met its match: the Convention was saved.
A few weeks later, in October 1795, the Convention laid down its functions and was replaced by the Directory which body in the following February, conferred upon this remorseless gunner the command of the army of Italy, the army from which Hoche had been withdrawn to be thrown into prison. Behold then this new apostle of grape-shot red-handed from the slaughter of his fellow republicans, at the head of the best and worst army of the Republic! His men as it proved, were fully gifted with that fanatical valor which made the revolutionary soldier so formidable; but their clothes were in rags and their shoes full of holes, and as for food Thiers intimates that it was a choice between stealing and starving. Their young commander told them what was perfectly true—for he had contracted the habit of telling the truth when it would serve—that he was as poor as they; silver and gold had he none; but their bayonets were in good order, and he was going to lead them to a land of promise flowing with food and raiment and money to boot. And at the head of these marauders he passed into Italy.
I need not remind you how he made short work of all opposition; how three allied armies each superior to his own, went down one after another before his ragamuffins as if three earthquakes had yawned for them. History had never before and has never since recorded so rapid a succession of decisive victories.
Hoche read with mingled admiration and envy the bulletins that came from this astonishing campaign. He was loud in his applause of the new hero, but he was at no pains to conceal his chagrin that he himself had not been permitted to lead those troops to that field of glory. Had he been so permitted would the result have been the same? We may easily believe that his energy and soldiership would have borne him through triumphant; but that the Italian campaign would then have stood out the great masterpiece of modern warfare may be doubted. We may claim that Hoche was a great general without claiming for him the genius of Bonaparte.
La Vendée pacificated, Hoche fell into the delusion still common on the continent of Europe and in this country, that the Irish need only a little outside aid and coöperation to revolt against the domination of the English. He headed an expedition to Ireland. His fleet was scattered by a storm, and driven back; and as his services were needed elsewhere, he did not renew the attempt.
He took command of the army of the Sambre and Meuse and advanced to the left bank of the Rhine with eighty thousand men. On the right bank was the enemy in still greater force but much scattered to prevent him from crossing. The bridges and fords for miles bristled with cannon. But he outmanoevred his opponent and repeated the noted feat of Condé by crossing the Rhine in face of the enemy. A series of battles followed in which Hoche was victorious. He was pursuing the beaten allies, and had written to the Directory that he expected to bring them to bay on the banks of the Danube, when he received news of the armistice of Léoben signed by Bonaparte and the archduke Charles; and he had nothing to do but to lead back his troops foiled of their prey.
All misgiving as to the fidelity of Hoche to the Republic had vanished, while Bonaparte had already betrayed qualities which excited the distrust of the Directory just as Cromwell had excited the distrust and more of the Rump and of the Barebones parliament. The army of the Rhine was added to the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and the joint command given to Hoche, placed him in effect at the head of the military force of the nation. He was soon called to Paris to overawe the same uneasy spirits who had tried to overturn the Convention, and it is noteworthy that it was Hoche and not Bonaparte who was thus summoned, although it was the latter who had demonstrated as we have seen, the true method of arguing with those philanthropists.
The approach of Hoche to the Capital exposed him to a curious accusation which illustrates the taste of the revolutionists for mimicking the ancient Romans. The Directory had decreed a line of circumference around Paris within which no armed force must pass without special permission. Hoche had mistaken the boundary of this new Rubicon and had crossed it at the head of his men. He was arraigned before the Directory, but his explanation was accepted and he was more popular than ever.
This preference for Hoche over Bonaparte gave rise to jealousy which had no time to develop into action. Hoche returned to his camp at Wetzlar only to die. He who had faced death in so many pitched battles, was reserved to yield up his soul in peace, his wife and child kneeling at his bed-side. He was twenty-nine years old.
His death was so sudden that there was talk of poison, to which the autopsy it seems lent some color. Alexander Dumas makes no doubt that he was poisoned, and that it was done at the instigation of Bonaparte. But Dumas is not to be trusted. He had inherited the prejudices of his father a general of division who had served under Bonaparte and had had a bitter quarrel with him. Hoche had gone back to Wetzlar with a cough, and he probably died of pneumonia.
Had he lived would he too have bent the knee around the imperial throne? Probably not. Would he like Moreau have lent his sword to the enemies of France? That is still less probable. The French are apt to say that if Hoche had survived there would have been no empire, no emperor; but might there not have been something worse: France divided into two hostile camps under two great captains?
The renown of Hoche pales necessarily in the presence of that of his great rival, just as the renown of Hampden pales in presence of that of Cromwell; but as men and as patriots Hampden and Hoche were purer and nobler than their rivals. The former were ambitious for their country, the latter for themselves.
It is a satisfaction to add in conclusion, that in those impious years of the revolution, when Christian worship was neglected and at times proscribed, and a mummery in honor or dishonor of Reason and Human Nature substituted, Hoche did not share in the prevailing misbelief. He writes to a friend that he had been piously taught in his childhood, and that he still believes and reveres the religion of Jesus Christ.
One of the large war-steamers recently built by the French, is named the Hoche.
IN the fourteenth century the Spanish peninsula was divided into five kingdoms: four Christian and one Mahometan or Mohametan or Mohamedan. The reader will take his choice. Wars were constant between the two faiths. This was a blessing, at least for the Christians, for if they had not been kept always shoulder to shoulder against the Moor, they would have been less usefully busy cutting each other’s throats.
Nobody in the middle ages abstained from the vice of fighting. Bishops in panoply led their flocks to battle, and even a century later than the epoch of my story, one pope Julius II., whenever spiritual weapons failed him, which was often, seized the carnal, and showed himself one of the stoutest combatants in Europe.
On the throne of Castile sat Alphonzo XI. an able monarch. He was at the head of the Christian confederacy and commanded at the battle of the Rio Salado where the Moors suffered a great defeat. Alphonzo had married Dona Maria of Portugal a woman of harsh and gloomy temper whom he did not love. His affections were wholly bestowed upon Leonora de Gusman a lady of beauty and intelligence, belonging to the higher nobility. His queen nevertheless brought him one son, Don Pedro who is known in history as Pedro-the-cruel or Peter-the-cruel. It is he who is the chief subject of this paper.
By Leonora, Alphonzo had several children of whom the eldest or rather the first born, for he had a twin brother, was Don Enrique or Henry. Henry was his father’s favorite. He conferred upon him the estates of Trastamara with the title of count, and he is known as Henry of Trastamara. These two princes Don Pedro and Don Henry both grew up brave, energetic and capable.
It is easy to believe that the queen Dona Maria hated with all the bitterness of her sombre nature her more brilliant and beautiful rival Leonora; but so long as Alphonzo lived, there was peace in the family, because, different from some cases we hear of, it was he who was master of the house. But king Alphonzo died in the flower of his age, and then the trouble began.
Don Henry and his twin brother Don Frederic and their next brother Don Tello fled from the court. They were justly suspicious of the designs of their brother Pedro who was now king and of the queen-mother. Leonora was more confiding. She suffered herself to be drawn within the power of Dona Maria, and was seized and put to death; and soon after, the same fate overtook the younger children of Leonora.
These assassinations caused of course a deadly feud between the two branches of the family; and Don Henry and his brothers raised the standard of revolt. They were defeated. Don Frederic fell in battle. Henry and Tello fled to France where they entered the service of king John II., and fought under the famous captain Bertrand Du Guesclin at the battle of Poictiers. They were still unfortunate. The French were routed at Poictiers by the English and Gascons under Edward Prince of Wales called the Black Prince.
Pedro had been affianced to a sister of the Black Prince, Joanna Plantagenet daughter of Edward III. but she had died. Pedro then married Blanche de Bourbon of the younger branch of the blood royal of France. He lived with her, the chronicles say, just three days. His affections too had gone astray. He had had the good sense to keep in his service his father’s prime minister, Albuquerque who it seems was an able statesman. Albuquerque had a beautiful cousin known in history as Maria de Padilla. Pedro fell in love with her, and his passion was as lasting as it was sudden. Indeed the only redeeming trait in that man’s character seems to have been his undying fondness for a woman he had no right to love.
Before going further let us finish the story of queen Blanche. Some years afterwards she died in prison at Medina Sidonia. The average historian despatches her by poison given by her husband’s orders; but there really seems to be no other reason to believe he poisoned her than the habit he had fallen into of dismissing in that manner those of whom he was weary. All that is certain is that she fell sick and a physician was called in. That of itself commonly sufficed in those days. Even later, in the reign of Philip III. we are told by Le Sage that whenever the fashionable physician of Valladolid was seen to enter a house, the family undertaker immediately arranged the obsequies without further notice. And the same conscientious historian relates as corroborative, that Don Alphonzo de Leyva was once taken ill at a remote country tavern. His attendants scoured the neighborhood in every direction to find a doctor but without success. The consequence was Don Alphonzo de Leyva in a day or two got well and pursued his journey.
There were assassinations enough to lay at the door of Pedro without that one, and it is bad economy to put there more than are needed.
While Blanche was still living Pedro took it into his head to have another wife. He forced one of his bishops to marry him to Dona Joanna de Castro daughter of a noble Castilian. He had lived with Blanche three days; he lived with Joanna one, and then went back to Maria de Padilla.
It was in this same family of De Castro that had happened a few years previous, a tragic event which has ever since been the theme of song and story.
The father of Joanna for some offence real or pretended, had been obliged to take refuge in Portugal. He took with him his daughter Iñez half sister of Joanna. Portugal was then under the rule of Alphonzo IV. a severe master. His son and heir Pedro of Portugal was a prince of marked capacity. He was married and lived in peace if not in happiness, with his wife Constance who was valetudinary and petulant. Iñez de Castro was beautiful and to her beauty was added grace of manner and the accomplishments of that age. Pedro was attracted by her and she was drawn towards him. Their intimacy however did not go beyond the limits of friendship: the chronicles agree that the rights of Constance were respected. She was nevertheless jealous and suspicious; she was haunted with the idea that Pedro was only waiting for her to die in order to marry Iñez, and she resolved to prevent it. She obtained from the old king an order commanding Iñez to stand god-mother to one of her children. This, according to the canons of the Church, was an effectual bar to a marriage between Iñez and the father of the child. That matter arranged to her satisfaction, Constance died.
The real barrier between Pedro and Iñez being thus removed they made short work of the artificial one. Pedro induced the bishop of Guarda to marry them privately. Iñez was established at Coimbra on the banks of the Mondego where she become the mother of children. As the marriage was not known her reputation of course suffered.
King Alphonzo was tolerant enough of this liaison such as he imagined it to be; but the enemies of Pedro and of the de Castros penetrated the secret, and betrayed it to the king. He was furious, the more so that it was whispered in his ear that Iñez was practising against the life of Ferdinand son of Constance, so as to make way to the throne for her own son.
Alphonzo determined to put a stop to the thing in the way things were put a stop to in those days. Accompanied by three of his informers he flew to Coimbra. Iñez threw herself at his feet and pleaded so piteously for her life that the old king relented. He had not the heart to kill her. He turned away and as he withdrew, he let fall some expressions of impatience at his own weakness, which proved enough for the ruffians who were with him. They went back and plunged their daggers in the bosom of Iñez.
The rage of Pedro knew no bounds. He revolted against his father, and Portugal was devastated by civil war. At last, reflecting that he was heir to that kingdom, he made peace and became so calm that it was thought he had forgotten Iñez.
His father died and Pedro ascended the throne of Portugal. His first purpose was to lay hand on the murderers of Iñez. They had fled into Castile. He sent an envoy to Pedro-the-cruel claiming them; and the latter, not hindered by the obvious justice of the claim, gave them up, that is two of them; the third had escaped into Aragon beyond the reach of either Pedro. The two surrendered were put to death. Then to rehabilitate the memory of Iñez Pedro, with the bishop of Guarda by his side, publicly proclaimed the marriage. The body of Iñez was exhumed and the ceremony of coronation performed. A crown was placed upon her brow, and the whole court with Ferdinand son of Constance at the head, passed before her and kneeled and made obeisance as to a living queen. A gorgeous funeral followed, and the remains of Iñez were conveyed to the royal sepulchre of Alcobaca. Often, say the chronicles, did Pedro go there to weep at the tomb of his beloved wife; and he lies by her side now.
Such is the history of Iñez de Castro.
To return to Pedro of Castile.
The battle of Poictiers brought about a lull in the war between England and France, and Bertrand Du Guesclin was out of employment. He afterwards rose to be constable of France, but at this time he was a sort of contractor for military work to be paid for in silver and gold; and we shall see that he was not the only knight of high renown who bargained for pay. The implements he used were chiefly the Free-Companions, a class of combatants half soldier half robber that I have already described in my essay on the Captivity.
Henry of Trastamara proposed to Bertrand to unite their resources, march into Castile and dethrone Pedro. The knight accepted the offer. He hung his banner on the outward wall, and the Free-Companions came flocking to it like crows to a carcass. But where was the money to come from? the Free-Companions would not fight without pay. So Bertrand made a speech to them. He told them they were soldiers not thieves, and that it was more respectable to aid their brother-in-arms Henry of Trastamara to conquer a kingdom than to be robbing on the highway. He appealed too to their religious sensibilities, for in the middle ages religion mingled with everything, and was invoked to sanction all purposes good or bad. He bade them trust in Providence for their pay, and reminded them that they must now and then do some good work in order to give the devil the slip in the end.
The wholesome creed of good works prevailed at that epoch: justification by faith was hanging back, waiting for Luther; and there was none of this modern nonsense about there being no devil. These fellows knew there was one, and that he had cloven hoofs, a pronged tail and horns. Some of them had seen him, and if you called the fact in question, were ready to vouch for it with broad-sword or halberd at your choice. It is an historical error that Saint Dunstan and some other gentlemen of the cloth were the only persons who saw the devil in the dark ages.
Du Guesclin’s eloquence prevailed. The men caught the spirit of their chieftain, and flung up their caps and shouted Long live Henry of Trastamara! Glory be to God on high! The hosanna was in token of their repentance and of their resolution to do their marauding for the present as soldiers. The knave of hearts himself was not more contrite when he brought back those tarts and vowed he’d steal no more.
They set out for Spain. It occurred to them on the way, that it would be a pious duty to stop at Avignon and ask the blessing of the pope.
I must refer the reader to the essay on the Captivity for an account of this visit to his Holiness. It was successful beyond their hopes, so that now with money in both pockets and the benediction of the pontiff upon their enterprise, they felt they could ransack Castile with a clear conscience.
Pedro was not able to hold his own against them. He was driven from Castile, and Henry of Trastamara was crowned at Burgos.
Pedro fled into Guienne. That province then belonged to the English. It was a portion of the inheritance of Eleanor wife of Henry II. the first king of the House of Plantagenet. Edward the Black Prince governed it as viceroy and held his court at Bordeaux. Edward had been on the point of becoming brother-in-law to Pedro who had been affianced to Edward’s sister Joan as I have already related, and Pedro induced him to undertake to recover for him the throne of Castile. Edward insisted on a preliminary contract by which Pedro was to pay the cost of the expedition if successful. He then put his legions in motion. Henry called Du Guesclin to his side. The knight, probably the best soldier in Europe after Edward, was averse to a battle. He warned Henry that their Free-Companions would not stand against the disciplined veterans of the Black Prince; but Henry was rash as well as brave. He put too much trust in his Spanish contingent who had fought against the Moors and never yet turned their backs to an enemy. The result was the battle of Najara where Henry and Bertrand were defeated; and Pedro was restored to the throne.
Edward in taking leave, admonished him to be clement to his people, and not massacre quiet folks who during the short reign of Henry, had shown respect for the king de facto; and also to pay promptly the money he owed him. Pedro promised to do both; but Edward’s back was no sooner turned than the dagger, the bowl and the cord were in full play again. Pedro seemed to think he had too many subjects and that it was well to thin them out. One night a gentleman was set upon and killed in the streets of Toledo. A woman who had witnessed the fray, testified that one of the murderers made a crackling noise with his legs in walking. This was a known peculiarity of the king: he was the assassin. He ordered a wooden effigy of himself to be made and to be beheaded in the market-place. This expiation procured for him the name of Pedro-the-just.
As to the other point of his promise, he sent to Edward a small sum and then suspended payment. Edward demanded the remainder. Pedro, after having gone through the whole litany of excuses so well known to debtors, sent him word that if he wanted his money he had better come and get it. He could now do this with impunity. The prince had contracted in the Najara campaign, a dysentery which proved fatal. He lived long enough however to know that he had served an ingrate and to foretell that the service would do him no good.
The prediction was verified. Henry no sooner learned the death of the Black Prince than he hastened to concert new measures with Du Guesclin. Once more did the knight muster his tramps. They burst into Castile this time without visiting the pope and getting his blessing: perhaps the former benediction was still of force, though they had doubtless spent the money. Pedro was besieged in one of his towns and taken prisoner. He was brought into the presence of Henry. The two brothers had not met in fifteen years. They drew their swords and flew at each other with desperate fury, and Pedro fell by the hand of Henry.
Henry of Trastamara once more mounted the throne of Castile, and this time he transmitted it to his descendants. Through a succession of Henrys and Johns and Isabellas and Joannas which I spare you, the crown of Castile fell to Isabella wife of Ferdinand of Aragon. Their grandson was the great emperor Charles V. From him is descended the present House of Spain and also the House of Bourbon.
But I have intimated that the queen of England is descended from the cruel Pedro.
Isabella daughter of Peter and Maria de Padilla, married Edmund duke of York fifth son of Edward III. Their son Richard earl of Cambridge married Anne Mortimer a marriage which tied a knot in English pedigree that it took thirty years of civil war to untie, or rather to cut with the sword. And who was Anne Mortimer to set all England together by the ears?
In the several lulls in that civil war, when a Lancastrian and a Yorkist met by chance and talked politics, the former would say: John of Gaunt was the fourth son of Edward III. while your Edmund of York was the fifth, and thus Lancaster takes precedence. Softly my good Sir, replies the Yorkist: Richard of Cambridge married Anne Mortimer. The Lancastrian responds with the hyperbole that it is not worth while to go back to king Arthur. They touch their hats and bid each other good morning, or what is quite as likely, draw their swords and fight.
But who was Anne Mortimer that no honest Lancastrian could hear her name with patience?
In Shakspeare’s Henry IV. when the Percies revolt against Henry of Lancaster, Hotspur says he will find the king asleep and holla Mortimer in his ear; he will have a starling taught to say nothing but Mortimer and give it to the king.
What was there in the name of Mortimer to startle so rough a soldier as Henry IV.?
Lionel duke of Clarence was the third son of Edward III. older therefore than John of Gaunt. Lionel married an Irish girl named Burke. They had a daughter Philippa who married Edmund Mortimer earl of March. The grand-children of Edmund and Philippa were a second Edmund Mortimer and Anne. It was this Edmund whose name Hotspur threatened to holla in the ear of the sleeping king. Edmund Mortimer was at that moment king by right, according to the laws of succession to the crown then as now. The House of Mortimer however could not vindicate its right against two such powerful usurpers as Henry IV. and Henry V. But their successor Henry VI. was one of the weakest of monarchs, and under him the Mortimers began to hold up their heads. By that time they had become Plantagenets again. Edmund had died without issue; and Anne was the last of her family. She married as I have said, Richard Plantagenet earl of Cambridge. Their son was Richard duke of York who won the first battle of Saint Albans, and came near seizing the crown. His son Edward IV. did seize it. He married that charming widow Lady Grey daughter of Jaqueline of Luxembourg. (See Two Jaquelines.) The daughter of that marriage was Elizabeth Plantagenet who married Henry Tudor, Henry VII. It is there that Plantagenet becomes Tudor. Their daughter, Margaret Tudor married James Stuart, James IV. of Scotland, and it is there that Tudor becomes Stuart. The son of James and Margaret, was another James Stuart, James V. who married Mary of Guise of that famous House of Lorraine the upshoot of which is a remarkable event in French history. It took two assassinations to save the last of the Valois from having the crown snatched from his head by that able and unscrupulous family. The daughter of James V. and Mary of Guise was Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. She married her half-cousin Henry Stuart lord Darnley who like herself was grandchild of Margaret Tudor, and next to herself, heir to the English crown. The son of Mary and Henry Stuart was James VI. of Scotland and first of England. He married Anne of Denmark, and their daughter Elizabeth Stuart married Frederic count Palatine. The daughter of Elizabeth and Frederic was Sophia who married Ernest Augustus, elector of Hanover, and became the mother of George I. George III. was great-grandson of George I. and Victoria is granddaughter of George III.
Thus have we traced the pedigree of the Queen from Peter-the-cruel.
After so fatiguing a stretch, it is a comfort to take breath and reflect that thus far the Queen has not developed the objectionable traits of her ancestor. She has never been known to poison anybody, nor has a single case of midnight assassination been made out against her.
IT has been said that three men struck telling blows at the Roman hierarchy: Philip the fourth, John Wiclif and Martin Luther: a Frenchman, an Englishman and a German. The first opened the way for the other two. Philip IV. called the fair, that is the handsome, was the greatest of the Capetien kings, but his greatness was intellectual only. If he contributed largely to lead mankind out of the bog of superstition in which they were swamped, he did it simply to gratify his own rapacity and ambition. He was the first monarch to challenge the Church to a combat à outrance; and he succeeded in leading her captive literally as well as figuratively.
It is useless to try, as some quasi historians do, to explain the career of Wiclif without taking into consideration the state of the Church at that epoch; and if the reader is not informed on that point, he will not profit much by this essay till he has read, marked, learned and inwardly digested the previous one on the Captivity of Babylon.
Cotemporary with Philip IV. was Edward I. of England. The two were pretty evenly matched. Edward was probably the better soldier; but in his negotiations with Philip, the advantage remained to the latter. Edward married for his second wife Philip’s sister; and Edward’s son married Philip’s daughter. It was this last marriage that caused the hundred years war.
Edward’s grandfather king John, one of the basest of monarchs, had been compelled by his barons, to accept the Great Charter and solemnly to swear to observe it. He appealed to the pope Innocent III. to release him from that oath, and the pontiff consented on condition that John should cede to him in fee the kingdom of England and receive it back in tenancy as a fief of the Holy See, subject to an annual tribute of money as token of vassalage. The bargain was consummated: John was empowered to violate his oath, and his Holiness became Lord paramount of England. He received the tribute in silver and gold during the life of John and during the long reign of his son Henry III. the father of Edward. But when he, Edward, came to the throne he resolved not to be outdone by his incomparable brother-in-law, and refused to continue the tribute. The pope, Boniface VIII., did not follow up the claim with his usual tenacity. Perhaps because he already had his hands full with Philip; and perhaps because there supervened between him and Edward a negotiation of a different character. Edward at the head of an army, was pursuing his claim to the crown of Scotland. The Scotch appealed to the pope giving him a correct history of the transactions between the two kingdoms, by which the independence of Scotland was fully recognised. Boniface ordered Edward to withdraw his troops, alleging that Scotland belonged to him, Boniface—a new pretence little to the taste of the Scotch themselves. Edward denied the Scotch version, and told the pope that the English monarchy was founded by Brutus the Trojan in the time of the prophet Samuel, and that Scotland was subjugated and annexed by his Edward’s ancestor king Arthur, a prince for whose existence there was the same authority then as now, namely the rhymes of the nursery. Boniface was struck with the antiquity of the English monarchy and the deeds of the valorous Arthur, and he changed sides: he commanded the Scotch no longer to resist his beloved son in the Lord, king Edward.
Some years later we find Edward brought by his subjects to the verge of dethronement for his tyranny, and forced to ratify anew the Great Charter and swear to observe it; and then applying to Clement V. the French pope, Philip’s pope, first pope of the Captivity, for a dispensation from his oath. Great as Edward is made to appear to us in English histories, it is clear he was not the man to redeem his kingdom from the thraldom into which his grandsire had sold it. It was the paralysis of the political power of the Church effected by Philip IV., which gave scope to the innovations of Wiclif and led towards the emancipation of England.
We pass over the reign of Edward’s worthless son, and come to that of his grandson in the early part of whose reign Wiclif was born. The day of his birth is not known. The third Edward came honestly by his qualities moral and immoral. He was the grandson not only of Edward I. but of the terrible Philip. He was not an Englishman—the English blood in his veins was just a two hundred and fifty-sixth part. He was a French Spaniard with a taint of the Moor. He ground his subjects to powder by unprecedented taxation. He put the crown itself in pawn and left it there eight years. But he had inherited the unfailing sagacity of his maternal grandsire, and his people never brought him to terms by threatening to dethrone him.
If he himself did not turn upon the Church and rend her like Philip, he was ready to see others do it. For aught he cared, Wiclif and the other neologists of the day, might have gone over to the faith of his Saracenic ancestors, and translated into English the Koran instead of the Bible. Nor were his subjects much more true to the hierarchy: loyalty to the pope was no longer the vogue. Now-a-days not one Roman Catholic in a thousand knows that the see of Rome was ever anywhere else than in Rome: the Church has been remiss in disseminating information on that point; but at that time every Englishman not idiotic, knew that the pope was a Frenchman seated down on the Rhone; that the cardinals were French; that it was a Frenchman in London who received the tribute of king John when he could get it; that in fine the Church was a French industry which every honest Briton was bound to look upon with distrust.
In the previous century begging had been proclaimed as a means of grace, and this new road to heaven was eagerly seized upon by the religious orders. Even men of rank and wealth turned Franciscan or Dominican and worked out their own salvation by standing barefoot, a rope around the waist, at the corners of the streets, holding out a box for the contributions of the devout. The widow’s mite entitled her only to the formal and general prayers of the convent; but those who would make a handsome gift, were presented with a document on vellum called a letter of fraternity which gained for them special masses for the success of their schemes in this world, and for the tempering of purgatorial fires in the next. This traffic was profitable enough to attract a brisk competition among the different orders, for the monopoly; and each succeeding pontiff granted it to those who by their faith or works—chiefly the latter—had risen highest in his esteem.
England swarmed with these sturdy beggars, and this gave handle to Wiclif’s attacks not only upon them but upon monks in general. He himself was a secular priest, that is a priest belonging to no monastic order; and Roman Catholic writers aver that Wiclif’s hostility to the monks arose from party spirit; and even protestant historians do not wholly exculpate him in that regard. We know that feelings quite mundane went for something occasionally in the measures of Luther and of Calvin; and it is not improbable that Wiclif had a touch of human nature as well as they. He had been made warden of Canterbury in the place of a monk named Woodhall. The archbishop from whom Wiclif had received this appointment died, and his successor dismissed him and reinstated the monk. Wiclif appealed to the pope at Avignon, who decided against him, saying that none but monks were entitled to such preferment. Wiclif sounded the charge. He denied the pope’s infallibility; he denied his right to excommunicate except for crime; his right to extend absolution except to the penitent; his right to any temporal power, especially his claim to be Lord paramount of England by the cession of king John. He admitted that the pontiff was Christ’s vicar on earth so far as he conformed to Christ’s precept and example and no farther. As for the monks, not only their begging but some other of their short-comings more questionable were the subject of his invective; and to show them what they ought to be and to do he sent forth his poor priests as he called them, who clad in monkish garb, went into the streets and highways, not to beg but to preach the gospel and to read it to the people in English in the translation he was already making.
I have sketched the events which prepared the way for Wiclif, and it is proof of how well they had worked together for him that this opposition to the Church instead of losing for him the favor of the king, gained it. The tribute of John was in arrears, and pope Urban summoned Edward to appear before him at Avignon as his vassal, and give an account of himself. Edward was not disposed to make so long a journey for so little profit; but he agreed to send commissioners to meet those of his Holiness, at Bruges in Flanders. Wiclif had the honor of being appointed on this commission. A compromise was the result. Wiclif was rewarded for the skill he had shown as a diplomat, by being made rector of Lutterworth, and in that incumbency he spent the rest of his days.
William of Wykeham bishop of Winchester was a prelate of learning, talent and excellence. He deplored as earnestly as Wiclif the ecclesiastical abuses which reigned, and the objectionable ways of the monks. He was of a broad spirit: nice theological points never troubled him. He recked as little as Wiclif whether the Frenchman Grimoard, Urban V. was infallible or not, or whether he was entitled to the tribute of king John so long as he did not get it.[18]
But he idolised the Church and to maintain her dignity, her prerogative and even her wealth was what he lived for. Both these men were in advance of their age: the one by indifference to the prevailing superstitions, the other by a desire to blot them out. They ought have been friends; but one was a high churchman, the other a low churchman.
William of Wykeham had been chancellor of England and had resigned. In the next reign, that of Richard II., he was once more raised to that high office. In the meantime he had fallen out with John of Gaunt duke of Lancaster uncle of Richard, and that quarrel brought about an alliance between the duke and Wiclif. John was the fourth son of Edward III. and possessed the qualities of his race. He is supposed to have aimed to succeed his father on the throne, in contempt of the rights of his nephew, son of his illustrious brother the Black prince; but the boy had not yet displayed the unworthy traits which finally cost him his crown; and the memory of his father proved sufficient to guarantee the succession of one of England’s weakest sovereigns.
Finding the English throne impracticable, John attempted that of Castile, but here he met a rival whose claim was but little more valid than his, but who had got the start of him. Later the progeny of John of Gaunt and of Henry of Trastamara intermarried; and the present Houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon are descended from both of these adventurers.
Foiled in Castile duke John returned to England and plunged into politics. What the contention was between him and William of Wykeham, is not clear. It is probable that duke John was out of money, and remembering him of the manner in which his great-grandfather Philip had replenished his coffers, he was trying to defraud the Church, and that the chancellor frustrated those designs. Wiclif who was of the opinion of Agur, with a leaning towards poverty, considered the wealth of the Church as one of its abuses, and he sided with the duke. He did not serve an ingrate, for when at length he was arraigned before the bishop of London to explain his opinions, he walked into court accompanied by John of Gaunt on one side, and John’s friend Percy earl marshal of England on the other. Wiclif was feeble in body, and lord Percy told him to sit down. Not with my permission, said the bishop. Then without it, growled John of Gaunt, and he added that if the bishop put on airs he would drag him from his seat by the hair of his head. The session broke up in disorder; and one of the many inexplicable circumstances connected with Wiclif’s history, is that the populace who took the part of the bishop, vented their discontent not on Wiclif but on his lordly abettors.
Later, duke John abandoned Wiclif but not wantonly or without an effort to fetch him round to what he regarded a common sense view of the case. Politics had shifted, and the duke was on the side of the Church. He suggested to Wiclif that it was time for him to turn his coat also, and finding him obstinate he left him to his own devices for a pragmatical disturber of the public peace. It was inconceivable to John of Gaunt that a man of genius could be in earnest about what he considered as nothing more than the futilities of the schools.
Wiclif’s greatest work was his translation of the scriptures into English; but his version was not one that we would accept to-day for our guidance. It was the translation of the translation of a translation. Let us look a little into its pedigree: Some years before the birth of Christ, the old testament was translated into Greek. This version is called the Septuagint, because, according to the legend, seventy-two learned doctors were shut up in seventy-two separate cells and set to making seventy-two separate translations of the Hebrew scriptures. They accomplished the task in seventy-two days, and when they came to compare notes their seventy-two versions all agreed word for word letter for letter. There could be no doubt of the inspiration of a work so miraculous; and such was the authority of the Septuagint that the citations of the old testament in the new, are taken from it. The Church of Rome at an early day translated the Septuagint and the Apocrypha into its adopted tongue the latin, and this version is known as the old Vulgate. In the course of ages, and they were dark ages, by careless transcription and by the foisting in of strange theological ideas, the Vulgate had become corrupt, and such was its condition when Wiclif translated it. Two hundred years later the Council of Trent revised it and brought it into its present form. It is now the ultimate Bible of the Church Catholic Apostolic and Roman, from which there is no appeal: the original Hebrew and Greek go for nothing when they differ from it. Do you ask why? I answer that the Church is inspired as well as the Bible, and inspiration for inspiration, the later must supercede the earlier. You protestants have merely gone back and picked up the exhausted material of the Church, and made out of it a sort of Bible of your own, instead of accepting the better provision she offers you; and it distresses me to add that the Council of Trent has consigned you all to perdition for rejecting the Apocrypha.
Scripture in Wiclif’s day was a new revelation for the people, and the reading of his Bible was eagerly listened to; but some enthusiastic writers dilate upon its wide spread circulation, forgetting that the art of printing was then unknown, and that every copy was in manuscript, and that too not in the facile running hand of the present era, but in black-letter printed out, so to speak, with the pen. Le Bas estimates that a New Testament alone cost the equivalent of thirty pounds sterling money of his day which was early in this century—say two hundred dollars of our time, at which rate the whole Bible would cost say one thousand dollars. There were but few persons in the fourteenth century who could buy such books and but few who could read them.
The style of Wiclif’s Bible is simpler and clearer than the rest of his English. Green says that Wiclif’s style is a model, and that he was the father of our modern vernacular; but this is disposed of by better authority. Sharon Turner says that Wiclif’s style was inferior to that of some of his cotemporaries. Vaughn[19] whose biography of Wiclif is an almost continuous panegyric, says his style is repulsive and unintelligible. Le Bas says it is barbarous. Knight’s history says it is so obscure as to defy interpretation. The truth is, Wiclif like many another man of genius, had not the minor gift of phrase-making; and the better English of his Bible was owing to his collaborators who possessed that gift. Wiclif with the rest of his knowledge, had self-knowledge: he knew his own defects and how to obviate them.
As for his opinions they were fluctuating; and different writers give different accounts of them. His eulogists say they were progressive; his enemies that he recanted. Hume says he had not the spirit of a martyr, and was ready to explain away his doctrines whenever they put him in danger; but it is probable that such was the unpopularity of the French hierarchy that he ran no risk of martyrdom. He was not only left undisturbed in his cure of Lutterworth, but in spite of his opinions he was made one of the royal chaplains at the accession of Richard II.
We find him at one time appealing to the pope against the archbishop of Canterbury; at another, calling his Holiness a purse-kerver that is a pick pocket. Some of his expressions seem to call in doubt the existence of purgatory; but he upholds masses for the dead. He adheres to the seven sacraments, but he not only condemns the restrictions of the Church on the marriage of relatives, he approves of that connection between those more nearly allied in blood than is now sanctioned by modern legislation. He was no doubt betrayed at times by the sharpness of his own dialectics. His was the logic of the schools, the logic of the nominalists and the realists, of Abelard, Aquinus and Dun Scotus, a logic by which anything might be proved or disproved at choice.
The most important and most difficult question is what were his opinions of the Eucharist. It is commonly said that he denied Transubstantiation. But how far did he deny it?
The term transubstantiation was not known till the twelfth century. For eleven hundred years, Christian theology had subsisted without it; and when it came, it came as all words come—the product of evolution. It is not known at what time the idea was first formulated that when Christ said this is my body; this is the blood of the new testament, he taught that there was no longer any distinction of entity or identity between himself and the bread and wine he held in his hand—that he was they, and they were he. This dogma, shadowy at first, grew more and more palpable till it developed into a word to express itself. But the theologians still imagined a difference. Did Christ on that occasion annihilate the bread and the wine, and substitute for them himself so utterly that the physical qualities of bread and wine still apparent to the senses, were a delusion? If he did, it was unqualified or major transubstantiation; if he did not, it was qualified or minor transubstantiation which after a time took the name of Consubstantiation. The latter was the creed of Wiclif. He admitted the Real presence; he declared that the bread after consecration, was the very body that hung upon the cross; but he held that the inner somethingness of bread, as he expressed it, still remained. Thus far and no farther did he deny transubstantiation. Archbishop Trench says Wiclif escaped one danger only to fall into another equally great. The distinction between the two was a mere logomachy which had no practical effect on his conduct. He cleaved to the Mass; and it was at the celebration of that rite in his own church at Lutterworth that he received his death shock.
Can the Mass exist without transubstantiation major or minor? Let us see. The Mass is not a mere church service, it is a sacrifice, a renewal of the Atonement, a rehearsal of Calvary. The consecrated Bread is the body and blood which suffered crucifixion; it is the Host, the victim. The priest raises it on high, and the people fall and worship it; Wiclif worshipped it. Is this idolatry? Not if God himself lies on that silver paten.
Had Wiclif been born sixty years later, we never should have heard of him: such a career as his would have been impossible. The House of Lancaster had then usurped the throne, and sought to strengthen its claim by subservience to the see of Rome. I say Rome in italics because the Captivity had lapsed into the Great Schism—a pope at Rome and a pope at Avignon—England was of the obedience of the former, France of the latter. The odium theologicum was reënforced by the odium politicum; and while any English priest might vent one or both, with impunity and applause, upon his Holiness at Avignon, he would risk his life if he tried it upon his rival Holiness at Rome.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Note: Green throws light on the fall of James’s father Charles I. He says it was Villiers, duke of Buckingham, “who was destined to drag down in his fatal career the throne of the Stuarts.” His fatal career was posthumous: he had been assassinated twenty-one years previous.
[2] Note: Such is Berwick’s own story. See his memoirs. Macaulay’s account of the matter is one of his boldest perversions, inasmuch as he cites Berwick at the head of the list of his authorities. See Macaulay, Lippincott edition, Vol. IV, pages 325, 326, 327.
[3] One of the largest pictures in the museum in Central Park, New York, represents or rather misrepresents this scene.
[4] The papal crown was not originally a tiara: it was single like any other crown. Boniface VIII. added the second crown. It is not known who added the third: it has been attributed to John XXII., to Urban V., and to Benedict XIII.
[5] Capet was a nickname given to Hugh the founder of the dynasty, and was not borne by any of his descendants, excepting that the line is called the capetien. The meaning of Capet is uncertain.
[6] We shall throw some light upon this want of credit in princes of the blood, when we come to speak of Louis of Orleans.
[7] Of the two grandmothers of Edward III., one, Eleanor of Castile, was pure Spanish, and the other, Joanna of Navarre, was half or more.
[8] Had the male line of Burgundy survived, it would have inherited the crown instead of the House of Bourbon.
[9] This low opinion of Scotch valor was still rife in Shakspeare’s time. The poet in describing the lovers of Portia, makes the German a drunkard, the Frenchman a montebank and the Scotchman a coward.
[10] Green calls this prelate sometimes bishop of Winchester and sometimes bishop of Chichester. He was so swept along by his own rhetoric that he forgot men’s names like the Bastard in King John.
[11] Malone whose researches had been standard authority fifty years when Green wrote, says that two lines only of that incomparable scene were thus taken. But let us be just to Green; his incapacity to discern the touch of Shakspeare, and his inadequate knowledge of Shaksperean literature, are after all, among the least defects of his histories.
[12] The order of the Golden Fleece is still extant. The emperor of Austria and the king of Spain, both descendants of Philip, share between them the Grandmastership of the order.
[13] Philip’s third wife was Isabella of Portugal, granddaughter of John of Gaunt, and therefore niece of the cardinal and cousin of Bedford. Isabella was the mother of Charles-the-rash, and it is thus that the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons trace descent from the Plantagenets.
[14] Louis XII. was grandson of Louis of Valentina. Their great-grand-daughter; grand-mother hyphenated below Margaret of Valois was grand-mother of Henry IV. from whom have descended all the branches of the House of Bourbon.
[15] Dunois took his title, count of Dunois, from an estate given him by his half-brother the duke of Orleans, one of those who had stood by his side at the dying bed of Valentina.
[16] Byng was defeated by a French fleet in the Mediterranean. There was no question of his courage or loyalty, but he was none the less condemned to be shot; and the barbarous sentence was carried into effect, Voltaire said it was “pour encourager les autres.”
[17] Dumouriez did not wait for a second embassy; he fled and there fled with him a young prince who had fought by his side for republican France—the duke of Chartres, afterwards duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis Philippe king of the French.
[18] Infallibility of the pope and Immaculate conception of the Virgin were in that age and long after, points in dispute. The Church had not yet erected them into cardinal doctrines which we may question only at the peril of our salvation. Those additional burthens upon our faith were reserved for the present century.
[19] Green cites Vaughn for his authority. The recurrence of such cases justifies E. A. Freeman in saying that Green was not in the habit of reading the authors he quotes; and that he should be judged rather by his essays than by his histories.