Part 5

How the Pretender's enterprise ended we all know. He does not appear to have been particularly attentive to his late host, the Duke of Lorraine. On the 24th of October he sent him a formal farewell; but on the 7th November we have the Duke stating as a grievance that he is without news. During November we find people in Paris growing remarkably confident. On the 2d of December Lord Stair complains that "_les plus sages à la Cour_" are just again beginning to treat the Chevalier as Pretender. Until two days before he was "King of England" to every one in Paris, "_et tout le monde avoit levé le masque_." There was not a single Frenchman, having any connection with the Court, who so much as set foot in Stair's house. Everybody thought that the Stuart cause was about to triumph. But the 11th of January, 1716, saw James back at Gravelines, "_d'où il repassa en Lorraine_," say the MSS. in the _Archives Nationales_. Mrs Strickland will have it that he went to Paris, where Bollingbroke advised him to go straight into Lorraine, without first asking leave of the Duke--which advice he did not follow. Independent Lorrain sources state that he passed through Lorraine, "_courant la poste a 9 chevaux_." As he had left all his goods and chattels at Bar-le-Duc, that seems the more likely version. Before his departure Duke Leopold had assured the Pretender that his dominions would always be open to him, and that he "_pourroit compter sur luy en tout ce qui en pourroit dependre_." In March, however, under altered circumstances, we find him advising Queen Mary Beatrice "for the second time," that he cannot again receive her son into his duchy. The Pretender himself seems to have taken the first warning. For we read in the 'Gazette de Hollande' that his _Domestiques et Equipages_ were removed from Bar to Paris in February. According to M. Konarski (I have not verified the entry in the archives, but it is doubtless correct) James left Bar on the 9th of February, "_sans adresser ses remerciments et ses adieux au duc Leopold_," says Noel; "_comme un escroc vulgaire_," says M. Konarski. "_Ne se contentant pas de largent que Léopold lui donnait il emprunta des sommes assez fortes aux seigneurs et partit sans les rembourser._" The sum of 15,000 francs paid to his friend M. de Bassompierre, which appears in the official accounts, is only one such debt. "_Cette ingratitude de la part du Chevalier de Saint Georges_," adds Noel, "_indignait toute la Cour_." People spoke to Leopold about it. "Gentlemen," said the Duke, "you forget that this Prince is in misfortune, and that he was a king." On another occasion he remarked to M. Bardin:--"He has done me justice; he has thought that I have simply performed my duty in assisting an unfortunate."

If the direct benefits which the hospitality extended to James brought to Lorraine were less than nil, the indirect were scarcely more valuable. No doubt, the Pretender having set the example, not a few Roman Catholics from the United Kingdom, so Noel relates, sought the same hospitable refuge. Others came--among them both Noel and Marchal name the elder Pitt--to take advantage of the new Academy opened by Leopold, and rapidly blossoming into greatness under such distinguished masters as Duval and Vayringe. Some of these men brought plenty of money with them, and their liberal fees went to swell acceptably the new professors' receipts. But the number of impecunious persons, more particularly Irish, who flowed to the Lorrain Court to prey upon Leopold's generosity, seems to have been even larger. "_Nous regorgeons d'Irlandais_," writes the Duke's friend Bardin in 1719--_Irlandais_ who evidently boasted but little money and less gratitude. Bardin complains of an exceptionally bad case of the latter sort. Leopold mildly replies. "I helped him, not for his sake, but for my own."

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In 1749, when the Duc fainéant, Stanislas Leszinski, "_simple gentilhomme lithuanien_," was holding his gay little Court at Lunéville, with Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet to lend brilliancy to it, and Madame de Boufflers to preside as elderly Venus, we read that the whole company were deeply touched when the great French writer, as was his wont, read out aloud his just completed chapter on the Stuarts, in the 'Siècle de Louis XV.' Everybody had a regret for the hardly used dynasty. Scarcely had Voltaire closed his book, when in rushed a messenger, bringing the tidings that James's son, Charles Edward, doubly an exile after the failure of his rebellion of 1745, had, on the demand of the English Government, been seized at Paris on leaving the Opera. "Oh heaven!" exclaimed Voltaire, "is it possible that the king can suffer such an indignity, and that his glory can have been tarnished by a stain which all the water of the Seine will not wash away!" The whole company was moved. Voltaire retired gloomily into his own room, threw down his MS. into a corner, and did not take the work up again till he found himself amid the more prosaic surroundings of Berlin. Very shortly after Charles Edward himself knocked at Stanislas' door. What he did during the nearly three years that he was a refugee at Lunéville, it seems impossible to ascertain. The French State Papers are silent--at Lunéville not a tradition has survived. His doings evidently were not considered worth recording. The drama of Stuart kingship was played out. The dream had come to an end. And so Courts grew cold.

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A fate not so very dissimilar--except for one brilliant saving incident--awaited those very Dukes who had shown hospitality so freely to the Stuarts. The Stuart Pretendership and the Lorrain Dukedom came to an end at pretty nearly the same time. Hanover elbowed out the one, France the other. The Stuarts went down for good. The Lorrains found themselves transplanted to Vienna, and crowned with the Imperial diadem. They brought their new country good qualities and manners insuring popularity. But they brought it no luck. For once the old Austrian distich spoke wrong:--

"Bella gerunt alii, tu, felix Austria, nube! Nam quae Mars aliis, dat tibi regna Venus."

Under the Lorrain Emperors came the Seven Years' War, which lost Austria Silesia; the Napoleonic wars, which lost much territory in the west; 1859, which lost part of her Italian possessions; 1866, which tore away the rest, and, moreover, turned Austria out of Germany. But the Lorrain Emperors have not forgotten their old virtue of hospitality. It may seem a strange whim of fate that at the present time the principal among those dispossessed sovereigns and unrecognised Pretenders who have flocked for protection under the hospitable "Double Cross," now carried back almost to its Eastern birthplace, should be the direct descendant and representative, six generations down, of the relentless and troublesome rival of that same Stuart James, whom, with not a little risk and cost to himself, the last really Lorrain Duke generously sheltered in the years from 1713 to 1716.

II.--RICHARD DE LA POLE, "WHITE ROSE."[4]

English visitors at Metz--there ought to be more, for there is not a little that is interesting to be seen in and around the old imperial city--are likely to have pointed out to them some venerable house or other, which, their guides will tell them, was nearly four hundred years ago the residence of a great English noble, a pretender to the crown, and the terror of Henry VIII.--the "Duke of Suffolk." Some guides may even style him "The King of England," since their distinguished townsman, Philippe de Vigneulles, gives him that title. In all probability the house shown will be the wrong one. For there is a great deal of loose and inaccurate archæology prevalent in these parts, and one old house is very apt to be confounded with another. I myself have had a leading French archæologist in Metz indicating to me an old Merovingian palace--highly interesting, to be sure--as the "Duc de Sciffort's" quarters. Once the building was plainly ancient, the trifling difference of eight hundred or a thousand years in the several dates made no odds to him. With the kind assistance, however, of the present archivist, Dr. Wolfram, my friend M. des Robert and the help of some old documents preserved in the local library--which in spite of repeated pilferings for the enrichment of Paris, still contains many valuable old manuscripts, I have been able pretty clearly to trace the movements in Metz of our distinguished countryman--who was indeed a claimant to the English crown, and over whose death in the battle of Pavia, in 1525, Henry VIII. exulted with such exuberance of gratitude to Providence, that he ordered a second public thanksgiving to be held "with great joy" on the 16th of March, the triumph proper for the victory of Pavia having--somewhat rashly, as it afterwards turned out--been celebrated on the 9th day of that month.

The story of this Englishman's exploits abroad affords some features of interest. It is a rather curious tale of adventure, love and war, strange escapades, intrigues, and ambition. And it may be worth telling, because I find that in English historical writings there is a gaping hiatus on the subject--which is not a little remarkable. For, considering what an ever-present weight Richard evidently was on the minds of the two last Henrys, to what all but incredible lengths those kings carried their unscrupulous persecution of him--how they offered bribes to kings to deliver him up, and to meaner men to assassinate him--how not a treaty was proposed to foreign potentates but contained a special clause forbidding the harbouring of this dangerous character--one might have supposed that our chroniclers of the time would have deemed it expedient to tell posterity something about him. Their silence is explained by a strange want of materials. So little turns out to have been known in this country about the great marpeace, that Mr. Burton, in his 'History of Scotland,' actually assigns to him the wrong christian name, calling him "Reginald." Mr Gairdner in his interesting preface to one of the volumes of 'Chronicles and Memorials' goes at some length into the history of Richard's brother Edmund. What became of Richard himself--except that he fell at Pavia--he confesses that he "cannot trace at all accurately." Napier in his 'Notices of Swyncombe and Ewelme' supplies fuller information than any other English writer. But he, too, is evidently at fault for materials. It is practically only foreign sources, very little studied in this country, to which we have to look for information on the subject of how "White Rose" employed the time of his exile, be it self-imposed or involuntary, which made up the main portion of his life.

The chief of such writers is Philippe de Vigneulles, a contemporary of Richard's, and a citizen of Metz, who has left rather curious and pretty full memoirs written in that strange-sounding, uncouth Lorrain French, which was at his time spoken at Metz. The original manuscript, formerly in the possession of Count Emmery, was some time ago purchased at a sale by M. Prost, the well-known Lorrain archæologist. From it M. des Robert, another well-known writer, specifically connected with the ancient city of Metz--which only patriotic considerations have led him to desert--has drawn the information which some years ago he incorporated in a little monograph. Even this monograph leaves some gaps. And the author falls into one or two odd mistakes--which are no doubt excusable in a foreigner. For instance, he confounds the "rebel and traitor" Richard de la Pole with one of the most faithful followers of the Tudor kings, Sir Richard Pole, of Lordington, in ascribing to his hero, first, the office of Chamberlain to Prince Arthur, and later on the fatherhood of Reginald Pole the cardinal. But his pamphlet is decidedly useful, as supplying clues, which I have been able to follow up successfully on the spot.

Richard de la Pole was the last member of a family which, within the space of about a century of strange vicissitudes, ran through all the stages of rapid rise, almost to the height of the throne, and no less sudden, humiliating descent, to attainder, execution, confiscation, and dishonour. I cannot stop here to tell their history at length. Genealogists have been careful to point out that the French prefix _de la_ proves no Norman descent. There is no "de la Pole," nor any name resembling it, to be met with in the Battle Roll. The De la Poles' origin was, in fact, so humble, that their first distinguished member, Michael, the prosperous merchant--to whom his native town, Hull, raised a monument in 1871--afterwards Lord Chancellor of England and Knight of the Garter, is described in Camden as "basely born." His "base birth," it is true, has been disproved. But that only makes a difference of two or three generations. When Richard and his brothers came into the world, the family had had five generations of titled distinction and notoriety--partly of honour and partly of disgrace. Only one Suffolk of this creation--Richard's father--seems to have died at home and in his bed. And even his death was caused by "grief for the ruin of his family." The Lord Chancellor expired almost exactly a century before of "a broken heart" in exile. His son fell a victim to "dissentery" before Harfleur. The next Earl was honourably killed at Agincourt. His son, again, the "Duke of Suffolk" denounced in early ballads, lived to disgrace that dukedom which he had first obtained, and to die by lynch law under the form of a trial, for having had a hand in the murder of Humphrey, the "good" Duke of Gloucester, and in the surrender of Normandy and Aquitaine to France. This "bad" Duke's son rose once more to high distinction. King Edward IV. actually conferred upon him the hand of his sister Elizabeth; and Richard III., on the death of his own only son, appointed his eldest son John--created Earl of Lincoln--next heir to the throne. That appointment proved in after-time a rather questionable boon to the family. For it involved both John and his brothers in perils, and intrigues, and persecution. The Earl of Lincoln fell in the battle of Stoke, fighting for Simnel, the pretending Earl of Warwick, and by his treason and disgrace caused the death of his father. Of course his estates and titles were held to be forfeited. That forfeiture notwithstanding, the Earl of Lincoln's next brother was admitted to some part of the succession, both of estate and of title, by amicable arrangement with King Henry VII. These peerage cases were dealt with in those days in a very different manner from what they are now, as appears from the fact, that only some eight years previously, in Edward IV.'s reign, the De la Poles' rather distant cousin, the then Duke of Bedford--a Neville, not a Russell--had been deprived of his peerage by Act of Parliament on the score of poverty.

Edmund de la Pole bargained with Henry VII., and recovered part of his brother's possessions and also the humbler of his titles in the peerage, by sacrificing the higher. He was admitted to the peerage as "Earl of Suffolk." Notwithstanding his renunciation, he, later on, when in exile, again claimed the dukedom. Edmund had in his youth been reported by the University of Oxford in a letter addressed to his uncle, King Edward IV., "a penetrating, eloquent, and brilliant genius"--anything but which he proved himself to be. His letters read like the writing of a man of very poor education, even judged by the standard of those unlettered days. And at Court he played his cards so unskilfully, that he soon became, from a rather petted hanger-on, a declared "rebel and traitor," persecuted with all the unrelenting meanness and malice that the two first Tudor kings--the first, at any rate, not feeling very secure on his throne--were masters of. That almost necessarily involved his younger brother Richard in a like fate--which Richard did nothing to evade. Edmund, we read, had the misfortune to kill a "mean" person, whom he presumed to chastise for insulting him. For this he was brought before the King's Bench and adjudged guilty. The king readily granted a pardon. But the Earl took the indignity of his mere trial so much to heart, that he very unwisely fled die country. People said that he had taken refuge at the Court of his aunt Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, which was then notoriously the gathering-place of malcontent Yorkists. This turned out incorrect. But the rumour may have helped to prejudice Henry against him. Edmund returned home for Prince Arthur's wedding in 1501, and appears to have been at pains to make his loyalty know, and to have been outwardly well received. But almost immediately afterwards he ran away a second time. And as he forthwith proclaimed himself a pretender to the throne, and obtained from the Emperor Maximilian a promise of material help--the loan of 4000 of his troops, wherewith to make good his pretention--it is not surprising that Henry should have set all his ample apparatus of crafty persecution at work against a man become so dangerous a foe. But it is surprising to find him stooping so very low in his recourse to dirty expedients. The State Papers show that bribes were offered all round--to the Emperor, to the King of France, Louis XII., to Philip of Castile and Burgundy--as much as twelve thousand crowns in gold--for Edmund's surrender or despatch. At length, in 1506, Fortune put Philip into Henry's power--a storm driving him on our coast. And Henry meanly took advantage of that opportunity to extort from the Spaniard an undertaking to surrender Edmund--then detained at Namur--agreeing, in return, to Philip's stipulation, that the prisoner's life should be spared. That promise he kept to the letter. Edmund was detained in the Tower until Henry's death--and then executed on Tower Hill by Henry VIII., in obedience to a direction set down with incredible rancour in his father's will. Dugdale suggests that, Edmund being so popular as a pretender, Henry VIII. did not like to leave the kingdom for a war projected in France, with his rival remaining in England alive. Another report says, that he was beheaded on the ground of correspondence proved to have taken place between himself and his brother, then a general in the French army.

Richard had taken service under the King of France as early as 1492. Charles VIII. detecting in him even then that brilliant capacity which made him in after-life one of the foremost generals of his day, intrusted to him the command of 6000 _lansquenets_, at whose head he mastered the difficult but valuable art of maintaining discipline among a most unruly, but at the same time most serviceable host, and qualified himself for that peculiar kind of warfare in which he subsequently gathered splendid laurels. By this early favour Charles linked to his Court an officer who, as Gaillard says, became one of "_cette pleiade de grands Capitaines qui illustrèrent les règnes de Louis XII. et François I., et portèrent si haut l'honneur de nos armes--Bayard, la Palisse, la Trémouille, duc de Gueldres, Robert de la Marck_ [better known as Fleurange, "Le Jeune Aventureux"], _et la famille de Rohan_." Of all these famous captains--and, moreover, of Francis of Angoulême himself--Richard was a comrade-in-arms and familiar friend. And nobody seemed to be able to manage the wild and "_indociles_" mercenaries, who were ready to place themselves at the service of any sovereign who would pay them, like himself. Dreaded foes--and to the people scarcely less dreaded allies--were those "bandes noires" of Northern Germany, who, like the modern Prussians, bore on their banner the colours of black and white. Before Pampeluna--of gloomy memory--they mutinied even against Bayard, "striking"--according to the most approved notions of nineteenth-century trades-unionism--at the most critical juncture for the concession of double pay. Bayard and Suffolk between them, however, soon reduced them to obedience. Brantôme relates that it was said of the _lansquenets_ that after St. Peter had refused them entrance into heaven, their troubled souls could not even obtain admission into hell. The very devils were afraid of this wild company. With these rough warriors did Richard fight his battles, and fought them so well, that there was not one of the three French kings whom he served, who did not feel moved to reward his services with a substantial pension, in addition to his open thanks. Ever foremost in battle, Richard's company "receveyd," as John Stile reports to Henry VIII., "most hurte and los of men then any other of that party." And on that fateful day which cost Richard his life, and Francis I. "_tout fors l'honneur_," the king declared that, if all his troops had but done their duty like Richard's _lansquenets_, the victory would have been his. Francis was especially beholden to these rough soldiers, because, by winning for him the battle of Marignano, when his crown was still young and unsettled upon his head, they raised him to high prestige, and completely altered his position in Europe. "_Ce gros garçon gâtera tout_," Louis XII. had said--leaving 1800 livres of debts for the "_gros garçon_" to pay. The prediction proved wrong.

When Richard de la Pole took service under Charles VIII., his father was recently dead "of grief," and his family were under a cloud, owing to Lincoln's rising in 1487. The "affable" king was much pleased with his captain, and after the siege of Boulogne assigned to him a pension of 7000 _écus_. At the conclusion of the treaty of Etaples, Henry VII. began his shabby course of persecution against Richard, from which he and his son never desisted while Richard was alive, demanding from Charles the surrender of his foe. Charles, however, flatly refused the demand. King Charles's pension, it is sadly to be feared, lapsed with his life in 1498; for in 1505, and thereabouts, we find Richard in absolute destitution--left, indeed, in pawn by his brother Edmund for that brother's debts with the citizens of Aix-la-Chapelle. (Sir Henry Ellis, with a little too much knowledge of German geography, places Richard at "Aken on the Elbe." It is, however, perfectly clear that the place of his detention was Aachen--that is, what we generally call Aix-la-Chapelle, but for which both Edmund and Richard adopted various fancy spellings, as, indeed, they did for most of their words, from the simple article upward.)