Part 1

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HISTORIC BUBBLES

BY

FREDERIC LEAKE.

_The earth has bubbles as the water has, And these are of them._--BANQUO.

_Mais les ouvrages les plus courts Sont toujours les meilleurs._--LA FONTAINE.

ALBANY, N. Y.: RIGGS PRINTING & PUBLISHING CO., 1896.

COPYRIGHT, 1896

BY

RIGGS PRINTING AND PUBLISHING COMPANY

CONTENTS

PAGE

Duke of Berwick, 7

Captivity of Babylon, 45

The Second House of Burgundy, 75

Two Jaquelines, 115

Hoche, 152

An Interesting Ancestor of Queen Victoria, 185

John Wiclif, 201

PREFACE

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.

The Duke of Berwick

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: