Socrates, the mind communicated knowledge not in the conscious everyday intelligence of the Athenian or of la Pucelle. This information, in Jeanne’s case, was presented in the shape of hallucinations of eye and ear. It was sane, wise, noble, veracious, and concerned not with trifles, but with great affairs. We are not encouraged to suppose that saints or angels made themselves audible and visible. But, by the mechanism of such appearances to the senses, that which was divine in the Maid–in all of us, if we follow St. Paul–that ‘in which we live and move and have our being,’ made itself intelligible to her ordinary consciousness, her workaday self, and led her to the fulfilment of a task which seemed impossible to men.
*See the Life and Martyrdom of St. Katherine of Alexandria. (Roxburghe Club, 1884, Introduction by Mr. Charles Hardwick). Also the writer’s translation of the chapel record of the ‘Miracles of Madame St. Catherine of Fierbois,’ in the Introduction. (London, Nutt.)
**See the writer’s preface to Miss Corbet’s Animal Land for a singular example in our own time.
VIII. THE MYSTERY OF JAMES DE LA CLOCHE
‘P’raps he was my father–though on this subjict I can’t speak suttinly, for my ma wrapped up my buth in a mistry. I may be illygitmit, I may have been changed at nuss.’
In these strange words does Mr. Thackeray’s Jeames de la Pluche anticipate the historical mystery of James de la Cloche. HIS ‘buth’ is ‘wrapped up in a mistry,’ HIS ‘ma’ is a theme of doubtful speculation; his father (to all appearance) was Charles II. We know not whether James de la Cloche–rejecting the gaudy lure of three crowns–lived and died a saintly Jesuit; or whether, on the other hand, he married beneath him, was thrown into gaol, was sentenced to a public whipping, was pardoned and released, and died at the age of twenty-three, full of swaggering and impenitent impudence. Was there but one James de la Cloche, a scion of the noblest of European royal lines? Did he, after professions of a holy vocation, suddenly assume the most secular of characters, jilting Poverty and Obedience for an earthly bride? Or was the person who appears to have acted in this unworthy manner a mere impostor, who had stolen James’s money and jewels and royal name? If so, what became of the genuine and saintly James de la Cloche? He is never heard of any more, whether because he assumed an ecclesiastical alias, or because he was effectually silenced by the person who took his character, name, money, and parentage.
There are two factions in the dispute about de la Cloche. The former (including the late Lord Acton and Father Boero) believe that James adhered to his sacred vocation, while the second James was a rank impostor. The other party holds that the frivolous and secular James was merely the original James, who suddenly abandoned his vocation, and burst on the world as a gay cavalier, and claimant of the rank of Prince of Wales, or, at least, of the revenues and perquisites of that position.
The first act in the drama was discovered by Father Boero, who printed the documents as to James de la Cloche in his ‘History of the Conversion to the Catholic Church of Charles II., King of England,’ in the sixth and seventh volumes, fifth series, of La Civilta Cattolica (Rome, 1863). (The essays can be procured in a separate brochure.) Father Boero says not a word about the second and secular James, calling himself ‘Giacopo Stuardo.’ But the learned father had communicated the papers about de la Cloche to Lord Acton, who wrote an article on the subject, ‘The Secret History of Charles II.,’ in ‘The Home and Foreign Review,’ July 1862. Lord Acton now added the story of the second James, or of the second avatar of the first James, from State Papers in our Record Office. The documents as to de la Cloche are among the MSS. of the Society of Jesus at Rome.
The purpose of Father Boero was not to elucidate a romance in royal life, but to prove that Charles II. had, for many years, been sincerely inclined to the Catholic creed, though thwarted by his often expressed disinclination to ‘go on his travels again.’ In point of fact, the religion of Charles II. might probably be stated in a celebrated figure of Pascal’s. Let it be granted that reason can discover nothing as to the existence of any ground for religion. Let it be granted that we cannot know whether there is a God or not. Yet either there is, or there is not. It is even betting, heads or tails, croix ou pile. This being so, it is wiser to bet that there is a God. It is safer. If you lose, you are just where you were, except for the pleasures which you desert. If you win, you win everything! What you stake is finite, a little pleasure; if you win, you win infinite bliss.
So far Charles was prepared theoretically to go but he would not abandon his diversions. A God there is, but ‘He’s a good fellow, and ’twill all be well.’ God would never punish a man, he told Burnet, for taking ‘a little irregular pleasure.’ Further, Charles saw that, if bet he must, the safest religion to back was that of Catholicism. Thereby he could–it was even betting–actually ensure his salvation. But if he put on his money publicly, if he professed Catholicism, he certainly lost his kingdoms. Consequently he tried to be a crypto-Catholic, but he was not permitted to practise one creed and profess another. THAT the Pope would not stand. So it was on his death-bed that he made his desperate plunge, and went, it must be said, bravely, on the darkling voyage.
Not to dwell on Charles’s earlier dalliances with Rome, in November 1665, his kinsman, Ludovick Stewart, Sieur d’Aubigny, of the Scoto- French Lennox Stewarts, was made a cardinal, and then died. Charles had now no man whom he could implicitly trust in his efforts to become formally, but secretly, a Catholic. And now James de la Cloche comes on the scene. Father Boero publishes, from the Jesuit archives, a strange paper, purporting to be written and signed by the King’s hand, and sealed with his private seal, that diamond seal, whereof the impression brought such joy to the soul of the disgraced Archbishop Sharp. Father Boero attests the authenticity of seal and handwriting. In this paper, Charles acknowledges his paternity of James Stuart, ‘who, by our command, has hitherto lived in France and other countries under a feigned name.’ He has come to London, and is to bear the name of ‘de la Cloche du Bourg de Jarsey.’ De la Cloche is not to produce this document, ‘written in his own language’ (French), till after the King’s death. (It is important to note that James de la Cloche seems to have spoken no language except French.) The paper is dated ‘Whitehall, September 27, 1665,’ when, as Lord Acton observes, the Court, during the Plague, was NOT at Whitehall.*
*Civ. Catt. Series V., vol. vi. 710. Home and Foreign Review, vol. i. 156.
Lord Acton conjectured that the name ‘de la Cloche’ was taken from that of a Protestant minister in Jersey (circ. 1646). This is the more probable, as Charles later invented a false history of his son, who was to be described as the son of ‘a rich preacher, deceased.’ The surname, de la Cloche, had really been that of a preacher in Jersey, and survives in Jersey.
After 1665, James de la Cloche was pursuing his studies in Holland, being at this time a Protestant. Conceivably he had been brought up in a French Huguenot family, like that of the de Rohan. On February 7, 1667, Charles wrote a new document. In this he grants to de la Cloche 500 pounds a year, while he lives in London and adheres to ‘the religion of his father and the Anglican service book.’ But, in that very year (July 29, 1667), de la Cloche went to Hamburg, and was there received into the Catholic Church, forfeiting his pension.
Christina of Sweden was then residing in Hamburg. De la Cloche apprised her of his real position–a son of the King of England–and must have shown her in proof Charles’s two letters of 1665 and 1667. If so–and how else could he prove his birth?–he broke faith with Charles, but, apparently, he did not mean to use Charles’s letters as proof of his origin when applying, as he did, for admission to the novitiate of the Jesuits at Rome. He obtained from Christina a statement, in Latin, that Charles had acknowledged him, privately, to her, as his son. This note of Christina’s, de la Cloche was to show to his director at Rome.
It does not appear that Charles had ever told Christina a word about the matter. These pious monarchs were far from being veracious. However, Christina’s document would save the young man much trouble, on the point of his illegitimacy, when, on April 11, 1668, he entered St. Andrea al Quirinale as a Jesuit novice. He came in poverty. His wardrobe was of the scantiest. He had two shirts, a chamois leather chest protector, three collars, and three pairs of sleeves. He described himself as ‘Jacques de la Cloche, of Jersey, British subject,’ and falsely, or ignorantly, stated his age as twenty-four. Really he was twenty-two.* Why he told Christina his secret, why he let her say that Charles had told her, we do not know. It may be that the General of the Jesuits, Oliva, did not yet know who de la Cloche really was. Meanwhile, his religious vocation led him to forfeit 500 pounds yearly, and expectations, and to disobey his father and king.
*Civ. Catt., ut supra, 712, 713, and notes.
The good King took all very easily. On August 3, 1668, he wrote a longa et verbosa epistola, from Whitehall, to the General of the Jesuits. His face was now set towards the secret treaty of Dover and conversion. The conversion of his son, therefore, seemed truly providential. Charles had discussed it with his own mother and his wife. To Oliva he wrote in French, explaining that his Latin was ‘poor,’ and that, if he wrote English, an interpreter would be needed, but that no Englishman was to ‘put his nose’ into this affair. He had long prayed God to give him a safe and secret chance of conversion, but he could not use, without exciting suspicion, the priests then in England. On the other hand, his son would do: the young cavalier then at Rome, named de la Cloche de Jersey. This lad was the pledge of an early love for ‘a young lady of a family among the most distinguished in our kingdoms.’ He was a child of the King’s ‘earliest youth,’ that is, during his residence in Jersey, March-June 1646, when Charles was sixteen. In a few years, the King hoped to recognise him publicly. With him alone could Charles practise secretly the mysteries of the Church. To such edifying ends had God turned an offence against His laws, an amourette. De la Cloche, of course, was as yet not a priest, and could not administer sacraments, an idea which occurred to Charles himself.
The Queen of Sweden, Charles added, was prudent, but, being a woman, she probably could not keep a secret. Charles wants his son to come home, and asks the Jesuit to put off Christina with any lie he pleases, if she asks questions. In short, he regards the General of the Jesuits as a person ready to tell any convenient falsehood, and lets this opinion appear with perfect naivete! He will ask the Pope to hurry de la Cloche into priest’s orders, or, if that is not easy, he will have the thing done in Paris, by means of Louis XIV., or his own sister, Henrietta (Madame). Or the Queen and Queen Mother can have it done in London, as they ‘have bishops at their will.’ The King has no desire to interrupt his son’s vocation as a Jesuit. In London the young man must avoid Jesuit society, and other occasions of suspicion. He ends with a promise of subscriptions to Jesuit objects.*
*Civ. Catt. Series V., vii. 269-274.
By the same courier, the King wrote to ‘Our most honoured son, the Prince Stuart, dwelling with the R.P. Jesuits under the name of Signor de la Cloche.’ James may be easy about money. He must be careful of his health, which is delicate, and not voyage at an unhealthy season. The Queens are anxious to see him. He should avoid asceticism. He may yet be recognised, and take precedence of his younger and less nobly born brother, the Duke of Monmouth. The King expresses his affection for a son of excellent character, and distinguished by the solidity of his studies and acquirements. If toleration is gained, de la Cloche has some chance of the English throne, supposing Charles and the Duke of York to die without issue male. Parliament will be unable to oppose this arrangement, unless Catholics are excluded from the succession.
This has a crazy sound. The Crown would have been in no lack of legitimate heirs, failing offspring male of the King and the Duke of York.
If de la Cloche, however, persists in his vocation, so be it. The King may get for him a cardinal’s hat. The King assures his son of his affection, not only as the child of his extreme youth, but for the virtues of his character. De la Cloche must travel as a simple gentleman.*
*Ut supra, 275, 278.
On August 29, Charles again wrote to Oliva. He had heard that the Queen of Sweden was going to Rome. De la Cloche must not meet her, she might let out the secret: he must come home at once. If Charles is known to be a Catholic, there will be tumults, and he will lose his life. Another letter, undated, asks that the novice, contrary to rule, may travel alone, with no Jesuit chaperon, and by sea, direct from Genoa. Consulting physicians, the King has learned that sea sickness is never fatal, rather salutary. His travelling name should be Henri de Rohan, as if he were of that Calvinistic house, friends of the King. The story must be circulated that de la Cloche is the son of a rich preacher, deceased, and that he has gone to visit his mother, who is likely to be converted. He must leave his religious costume with the Jesuits at Genoa, and pick it up there on his return. He must not land at the port of London, but at some other harbour, and thence drive to town.*
Ut supra, 283-287.
On October 14, d’Oliva, from Leghorn, wrote to Charles that ‘the French gentleman’ was on the seas. On November 18, Charles wrote to d’Oliva that his son was returning to Rome as his secret ambassador, and, by the King’s orders, was to come back to London, bearing answers to questions which he will put verbally. In France he leaves a Jesuit whom he is to pick up as he again makes for England.*
*Father Florent Dumas, in a rather florid essay on ‘The Saintly Son of Charles II,’ supposes that, after all, he had a Jesuit chaperon during his expedition to England (Jesuit Etudes de Rel., Hist. et Lit., Paris, 1864-1865).
The questions to which de la Cloche is to bring answers doubtless concerned the wish of Charles to be a Catholic secretly, and other arrangements which he is known to have suggested on another occasion.
After this letter of November 18, 1668, WE NEVER HEAR A WORD ABOUT JAMES DE LA CLOCHE.* No later letters from the King to d’Oliva are found, the name of James de la Cloche does not occur again in the Records of the Society of Jesus.
*Ut supra, 418-420.
Father Boero argues that James would return to London, under a third name, unknown. But it would be risky for one who had appeared in England under one name in 1665, and under another (Rohan) in 1668, to turn up under a third in 1669. To take aliases, often three or four, was, however, the custom of the English Jesuits, and de la Cloche may have chosen his fourth. Thus we could not trace him, in records, unless Charles wrote again to d’Oliva about his son. No such letter exists. In his letter of November 18, Charles promises, in a year, a subscription to the Jesuit building fund–this at his son’s request. I know not if the money was ever paid. He also asks Oliva to give James 800 doppie for expenses, to be repaid in six months.
James did not leave the Society of Jesus, argues Father Boero, for, had he left, he would have carried away the papers in which Charles acknowledges him and promises a pension of 500 pounds yearly. But that document would be useless to James, whether he remained a Jesuit or not, for the condition of the pension (1667) was that he should be a Protestant of the Anglican sect, and live in London. However, Charles’s letter of 1668 was in another tune, and James certainly left THAT with the Jesuits in Rome; at least, they possess it now. But suppose that James fled secretly from the Jesuits, then he probably had no chance of recovering his papers. He was not likely to run away, however, for, Charles says, he ‘did not like London,’ or the secular life, and he appears to have returned to Rome at the end of 1668, with every intention of fulfilling his mission and pursuing his vocation. His return mission to England over, he probably would finish his Jesuit training at a college in France or Flanders, say St. Omer’s, where Titus Oates for a while abode. No James de la Cloche is known there or elsewhere, but he might easily adopt a new alias, and Charles would have no need to write to Oliva about him. It may be that James was the priest at St. Omer’s, whom, in 167O, Charles had arranged to send, but did not send, to Clement IX.* He may also be the priest secretly brought from abroad to Charles during the Popish Plot (1678-1681).**
*Mignet, Neg. rel. Succ. d’Espagne, iii. 232. **Welwood, Memoirs, 146.
These are suggestions of Lord Acton, who thinks that de la Cloche may also have been the author of two papers, in French, on religion, left by Charles, in his own hand, at his death.* These are conjectures. If we accept them, de la Cloche was a truly self- denying young semi-Prince, preferring an austere life to the delights and honours which attended his younger brother, the Duke of Monmouth. But, just when de la Cloche should have been returning from Rome to London, at the end of 1668 or beginning of 1669, a person calling himself James Stuart, son of Charles II., by an amour, at Jersey, in 1646, with a ‘Lady Mary Henrietta Stuart,’ appeared in some magnificence at Naples. This James Stuart either was, or affected to be, James de la Cloche. Whoever he was, the King’s carefully guarded secret was out, was public property.
*Home and Foreign Review, i. 165.
Our information as to this James Stuart, or Giacopo Stuardo, son of the King of England–the cavalier who appears exactly when the Jesuit novice, James de la Cloche, son of the King of England, vanishes–is derived from two sources. First there are Roman newsletters, forwarded to England by Kent, the English agent at Rome, with his own despatches in English. It does not appear to me that Kent had, as a rule, any intimate purveyor of intelligence at Naples. He seems, in his own letters to Williamson,* merely to follow and comment on the Italian newsletters which he forwards and the gossip of ‘the Nation,’ that is, the English in Rome. The newsletters, of course, might be under the censorship of Rome and Naples. Such is one of our sources.**
*See ‘The Valet’s Master,’ for other references to Williamson. **State Papers, Italian, 1669, Bundle 10, Record Office.
Lord Acton, in 1862, and other writers, have relied solely on this first set of testimonies. But the late Mr. Maziere Brady has apparently ignored or been unacquainted with these materials, and he cites a printed book not quoted by Lord Acton.* This work is the third volume of the ‘Lettere’ of Vincenzo Armanni of Gubbio, who wrote much about the conversion of England, and had himself been in that country. The work quoted was printed (privately?) by Giuseppe Piccini, at Macerata, in 1674, and, so far, I have been unable to see an example. The British Museum Library has no copy, and the ‘Lettere’ are unknown to Brunet. We have thus to take a secondhand version of Armanni’s account. He says that his informant was one of two confessors, employed successively by Prince James Stuart, at Naples, in January-August 1669. Now, Kent sent to England an English translation of the Italian will of James Stuart. A will is also given, of course in Italian, by Vincenzo Armanni; a copy of this is in the Record Office.
*Maziere Brady, Anglo-Roman Papers, pp. 93-121 (Gardner Paisley, 1890).
It appears from this will that James Stuart, for reasons of his own, actually did enjoy the services of two successive confessors, at Naples, in 1669. The earlier of these two was Armanni’s informant. His account of James Stuart differs from that of Kent and the Italian newsletters, which we repeat, alone are cited by Lord Acton (1862); while Mr. Brady (1890), citing Armanni, knows nothing of the newsletters and Kent, and conceives himself to be the first writer in English on the subject.
Turning to our first source, the newsletters of Rome, and the letters of Kent, the dates in each case prove that Kent, with variations, follows the newsletters. The gazzetta of March 23, 1669, is the source of Kent’s despatch of March 30. On the gazzette of April 6, 13, and 20, he makes no comment, but his letter of June 16 varies more or less from the newsletter of June 11. His despatch of September 7 corresponds to the newsletter of the same date, but is much more copious.
Taking these authorities in order of date, we find the newsletter of Rome (March 23, 1669) averring that an unknown English gentleman has been ‘for some months’ at Naples, that is, since January at least, and has fallen in love with the daughter of a poor innkeeper, or host (locandiere). He is a Catholic and has married the girl. The newly made father-in-law has been spending freely the money given to him by the bridegroom. Armanni, as summarised by Mr. Brady, states the matter of the money thus: ‘The Prince was anxious to make it appear that his intended father-in-law was not altogether a pauper, and accordingly he gave a sum of money to Signor Francesco Corona to serve as a dowry for Teresa. Signor Corona could not deny himself the pleasure of exhibiting this money before his friends, and he indiscreetly boasted before his neighbours concerning his rich son- in-law.’
From Armanni’s version, derived from the confessor of James Stuart, it appears that nothing was said as to James’s royal birth till after his arrest, when he informed the Viceroy of Naples in self- defence.
To return to the newsletter of March 23, it represents that the Viceroy heard of the unwonted expenditure of money by Corona, and seized the English son-in-law on suspicion. In his possession the Viceroy found about 200 doppie, many jewels, and some papers in which he was addressed as Altezza (Highness). The word doppie is used by Charles (in Boero’s Italian translation) for the 800 coins which he asks Oliva to give to de la Cloche for travelling expenses. Were James Stuart’s 200 doppie the remains of the 800? Lord Acton exaggerates when he writes vaguely that Stuart possessed ‘heaps of pistoles.’ Two hundred doppie (about 150 or 160 pounds) are not ‘heaps.’ To return to the newsletter, the idea being current that the young man was a natural son of the King of England, he was provisionally confined in the castle of St. Elmo. On April 6, he is reported to be shut up in the castle of Gaeta. On the 20th, we hear that fifty scudi monthly have been assigned to the prisoner for his support. The Viceroy has written (to England) to ask what is to be done with him.
On June 11, it is reported that, after being removed to the Vicaria, a prison for vulgar malefactors, the captive has been released. He is NOT the son of the King of England.
Kent’s letter of March 30 follows the newsletter of March 23. He adds that the unknown Englishman ‘seems’ to have ‘vaunted to bee the King of England’s sonne BORNE AT GERSEY,’ a fact never expressly stated about de la Cloche. It is not clear that James Stuart vaunted his birth before his arrest made it necessary for him to give an account of himself. Kent also says that the unknown sent for the English consul, Mr. Browne, ‘to assist his delivery out of the castle. But it seems he could not speake a word of English nor give any account of the birth he pretended to.’ On Kent’s showing, he had no documentary proofs of his royal birth. French was de la Cloche’s language, if this unknown was he, and if Kent is right, he had not with him the two documents and the letter of Charles II. and the certificate of the Queen of Sweden. ‘This is all the light I can picke out of the Nation, or others, of his extravagant story, which whether will end in Prince or cheate I shall endeavour to inform you hereafter.’
Kent’s next letter (June 16) follows, with variations, the newsletter of June 11:–
Kent to J. Williamson
June 16, 1669.
The Gentleman who WOULD HAVE BEENE HIS MAT’YS BASTARD at Naples, vpon the receipt of his Ma’ties Letters to that Vice King was immediately taken out of the Castle of Gaetta brought to Naples and Cast into the Grand Prison called the Vicaria, where being thrust amongst the most Vile and infamous Rascalls, the Vice King intended to have Caused him to bee whipt about the Citty, but meanes was made by his wife’s kindred (Who was Likewise taken with this pretended Prince) to the Vice-Queene, who, in compassion to her and her kindred, prevailed with Don Pedro to deliver him from that Shame [and from gaol, it seems], and soe ends the Story of this fourb WHO SPEAKS NOE LANGUADGE BUT FFRENCH.
The newsletter says nothing of the intended whipping, or of the intercession of the family of the wife of the unknown. These points may be the additions of gossips.
In any case the unknown, with his wife, after a stay of no long time in the Vicaria, is set at liberty. His release might be explained on the ground that Charles disavowed and cast him off, which he might safely do, if the man was really de la Cloche, but had none of the papers proving his birth, the papers which are still in the Jesuit archives. Or he may have had the papers, and they may have been taken from him and restored to the Jesuit General.
So far, the betting as to whether de la Cloche and the Naples pretender were the same man or not is at evens. Each hypothesis is beset by difficulties. It is highly improbable that the unworldly and enthusiastic Jesuit novice threw up, at its very crisis, a mission which might lead his king, his father, and the British Empire back into the one Fold. De la Cloche, forfeiting his chances of an earthly crown, was on the point of gaining a heavenly one. It seems to the last degree unlikely that he would lose this and leave the Jesuits to whom he had devoted himself, and the quiet life of study and religion, for the worldly life which he disliked, and for that life on a humble capital of a few hundred pounds, and some jewels, presents, perhaps from the two Queens, his grandmother and stepmother. De la Cloche knew that Charles, if the novice clung to religion, had promised to procure for him, if he desired it, a cardinal’s hat; while if, with Charles’s approval, he left religion, he might be a prince, perhaps a king. He had thus every imaginable motive for behaving with decorum–in religion or out of it. Yet, if he is the Naples pretender, he suddenly left the Jesuits without Charles’s knowledge and approval, but by a freakish escapade, like ‘The Start’ of Charles himself as a lad, when he ran away from Argyll and the Covenanters. And he did this before he ever saw Teresa Corona. He reminds one of the Huguenot pastor in London, whom an acquaintance met on the Turf. ‘I not preacher now, I gay dog,’ explained the holy man.
All this is, undeniably, of a high improbability. But on the other side, de la Cloche was freakish and unsettled. He had but lately (1667) asked for and accepted a pension to be paid while he remained an Anglican, then he was suddenly received into the Roman Church, and started off, probably on foot, with his tiny ‘swag’ of three shirts and three collars, to walk to Rome and become a Jesuit. He may have deserted the Jesuits as suddenly and recklessly as he had joined them. It is not impossible. He may have received the 800 pounds for travelling expenses from Oliva; not much of it was left by March 1669–only about 150 pounds. On the theory that the man at Naples was an impostor, it is odd that he should only have spoken French, that he was charged with no swindles, that he made a very poor marriage in place of aiming at a rich union; that he had, somehow, learned de la Cloche’s secret; and that, possessing a fatal secret, invaluable to a swindler and blackmailer, he was merely disgraced and set free. Louis XIV. would, at least, have held him a masked captive for the rest of his life. But he was liberated, and, after a brief excursion, returned to Naples, where he died, maintaining that he was a prince.
Thus, on either view, ‘prince or cheat,’ we are met by things almost impossible.
We now take up the Naples man’s adventure as narrated by Kent. He writes:
Kent to Jo: Williamson
Rome: August 31, 1669.
That certaine fellow or what hee was, who pretended to bee his Ma’ties naturall sonn at Naples is dead and haueing made his will they write mee from thence wee shall with the next Poast know the truth of his quality.
September 7, 1669.
That certaine Person at Naples who in his Lyfe tyme would needes bee his Ma’ties naturall Sonne is dead in the same confidence and Princely humour, for haueing Left his Lady Teresa Corona, an ordinary person, 7 months gone with Child, hee made his Testament, and hath Left his most Xtian Ma’tie (whom he called Cousin) executor of it.
Hee had been absent from Naples some tyme pretending to haue made a journey into France to visit his Mother, Dona Maria Stuarta of His Ma’tie Royall Family, which neernes and greatnes of Blood was the cause, Saies hee, that his Ma’tie would never acknowledge him for his Sonn, his mother Dona Maria Stuarta was, it seemes, dead before hee came into France. In his will hee desires the present King of England Carlo 2nd to allow His Prince Hans in Kelder eighty thousand Ducketts, which is his Mother’s Estate, he Leaues Likewise to his Child and Mother Teresa 291 thousand Ducketts which hee calls Legacies. Hee was buried in the Church of St. Fran’co Di Paolo out of the Porta Capuana (for hee dyed of this Religion). He left 400 pounds for a Lapide to have his name and quality engrauen vpon it for hee called himself Don Jacopo Stuarto, and this is the end of that Princely Cheate or whatever hee was.
The newsletter of September 7 merely mentions the death and the will. On this occasion Kent had private intelligence from a correspondent in Naples. Copies of the will, in English and in Italian, were forwarded to England, where both copies remain.
‘This will,’ Lord Acton remarked, ‘is fatal to the case for the Prince.’ If not fatal, it is a great obstacle to the cause of the Naples man. He claims as his mother, Donna Maria Stewart, ‘of the family of the Barons of San Marzo.’ If Marzo means ‘March,’ the Earl of March was a title in the Lennox family. The only Mary Stewart in that family known to Douglas’s ‘Peerage’ was younger than James de la Cloche, and died, the wife of the Earl of Arran, in 1667, at the age of eighteen. She may have had some outlying cousin Mary, but nothing is known of such a possible mother of de la Cloche. Again, the testator begs Charles II. to give his unborn child ‘the ordinary principality either of Wales or Monmouth, or other province customary to be given to the natural sons of the Crown;’ to the value of 100,000 scudi!
Could de la Cloche be so ignorant as to suppose that a royal bastard might be created Prince of Wales? He certainly knew, from Charles’s letter, that his younger brother was already Duke of Monmouth. His legacies are of princely munificence, but–he is to be buried at the expense of his father-in-law.
By way of security for his legacies, the testator ‘assigns and gives his lands, called the Marquisate of Juvignis, worth 300,000 scudi.’
Mr. Brady writes: ‘Juvignis is probably a mistake for Aubigny, the dukedom which belonged to the Dukes of Richmond and Lennox by the older creation.’ But a dukedom is not a marquisate, nor could de la Cloche hold Aubigny, of which the last holder was Ludovick Stewart, who died, a cardinal, in November 1665. The lands then reverted to the French Crown. Moreover, there are two places called Juvigny, or Juvignis, in north-eastern France (Orne and Manche). Conceivably one or other of these belonged to the house of Rohan, and James Stuart’s posthumous son, one of whose names is ‘Roano,’ claimed a title from Juvigny or Juvignis, among other absurd pretensions. ‘Henri de Rohan’ was only the travelling name of de la Cloche in 1668, though it is conceivable that he was brought up by the de Rohan family, friendly to Charles II.
The whole will is incompatible with all that de la Cloche must have known. Being in Italian it cannot have been intelligible to him, and may conceivably be the work of an ignorant Neapolitan attorney, while de la Cloche, as a dying man, may have signed without understanding much of what he signed. The folly of the Corona family may thus (it is a mere suggestion) be responsible for this absurd testament. Armanni, however, represents the man as sane, and very devout, till his death.
A posthumous child, a son, was born and lived a scrambling life, now ‘recognised’ abroad, now in prison and poverty, till we lose him about 1750.*
*A. F. Steuart, Engl. Hist. Review, July 1903, ‘The Neapolitan Stuarts.’ Maziere Brady, ut supra.
Among his sham titles are Dux Roani and ‘de Roano,’ clearly referring, as Mr. Steuart notices, to de la Cloche’s travelling name of Henri de Rohan. The Neapolitan pretender, therefore, knew the secret of that incognito, and so of de la Cloche’s mission to England in 1668. That, possessing this secret, he was set free, is a most unaccountable circumstance. Charles had written to Oliva that his life hung on absolute secrecy, yet the owner of the secret is left at liberty.
Our first sources leave us in these perplexities. They are not disentangled by the ‘Lettere’ of Vincenzo Armanni (1674). I have been unable, as has been said, to see this book. In the summary by Mr. Brady we read that (1668-1669) Prince James Stuart, with a French Knight of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, came to Naples for his health. This must have been in December 1668 or January 1669; by March 1669 the pretender had been ‘for some months’ in Naples. The Frenchman went by way of Malta to England, recommending Prince James to a confessor at Naples, who was a parish priest. This priest was Armanni’s informant. He advised the Prince to lodge with Corona, and here James proposed to Teresa. She at first held aloof, and the priest discountenanced the affair. The Prince ceased to be devout, but later chose another confessor. Both priests knew, in confession, the secret of his birth: the Prince says so in his will, and leaves them great legacies. So far Armanni’s version is corroborated.
Mr. Brady goes on, citing Armanni: ‘At last he chose another spiritual director, to whom he revealed not only his passion for Teresa Corona, but also the secret of his birth, showing to him the letters written by the Queen of Sweden and the Father General of the Jesuits.’ Was the latter document Oliva’s note from Leghorn of October 14, 1668? That did not contain a word about de la Cloche’s birth: he is merely styled ‘the French gentleman.’ Again, the letter of the Queen of Sweden is now in the Jesuit archives; how could it be in the possession of the pretender at Naples? Was it taken from him in prison, and returned to Oliva?
The new confessor approved of the wedding which was certainly celebrated on February 19, 1669. Old Corona now began to show his money: his new son-in-law was suspected of being a false coiner, and was arrested by the Viceroy. ‘The certificates and papers attesting the parentage of James Stuart were then produced. . . ‘ How could this be–they were in the hands of the Jesuits at Rome. Had de la Cloche brought them to Naples, the Corona family would have clung to them, but they are in the Gesu at Rome to this day. The rest is much as we know it, save, what is important, that the Prince, from prison, ‘wrote to the General of the Jesuits, beseeching him to interpose his good offices with the Viceroy, and to obtain permission for him to go to England via Leghorn’ (as in 1688) ‘and Marseilles.’
Armanni knew nothing, or says nothing, of de la Cloche’s having been in the Jesuit novitiate. His informant, the priest, must have known that, but under seal of confession, so he would not tell Armanni. He did tell him that James Stuart wrote to the Jesuit general, asking his help in procuring leave to go to England. The General knew de la Cloche’s hand, and would not be taken in by the impostor’s. This point is in favour of the identity of James Stuart with de la Cloche. The Viceroy had, however, already written to London, and waited for a reply. ‘Immediately on arrival of the answer from London, the Prince was set at liberty and left Naples. It may be supposed he went to England. After a few months he returned to Naples with an assignment of 50,000 scudi,’ and died of fever.
Nothing is said by Armanni of the imprisonment among the low scum of the Vicaria: nothing of the intended whipping, nothing of the visit by James Stuart to France. The 50,000 scudi have a mythical ring. Why should James, if he had 50,000 scudi, be buried at the expense of his father-in-law, who also has to pay 50 ducats to the notary for drawing the will of this ‘prince or cheate’? Probably the parish priest and ex-confessor of the prince was misinformed on some points. The Corona family would make out the best case they could for their royal kinsman.
Was the man of Naples ‘prince or cheate’? Was he de la Cloche, or, as Lord Acton suggests, a servant who had robbed de la Cloche of money and papers?
Every hypothesis (we shall recapitulate them) which we can try as a key fails to fit the lock. Say that de la Cloche had confided his secret to a friend among the Jesuit novices; say that this young man either robbed de la Cloche, or, having money and jewels of his own, fled from the S. Andrea training college, and, when arrested, assumed the name and pretended to the rank of de la Cloche. This is not inconceivable, but it is odd that he had no language but French, and that, possessing secrets of capital importance, he was released from prison, and allowed to depart where he would, and return to Naples when he chose.
Say that a French servant of de la Cloche robbed and perhaps even murdered him. In that case he certainly would not have been released from prison. The man at Naples was regarded as a gentleman, but that is not so important in an age when the low scoundrel, Bedloe, could pass in Spain and elsewhere for an English peer.
But again, if the Naples man is a swindler, as already remarked, he behaves unlike one. A swindler would have tried to entrap a woman of property into a marriage–he might have seduced, but would not have married, the penniless Teresa Corona, giving what money he had to her father. When arrested, the man had not in money more than 160 pounds. His maintenance, while in prison, was paid for by the Viceroy. No detaining charges, from other victims, appear to have been lodged against him. His will ordains that the document shall be destroyed by his confessor, if the secret of his birth therein contained is divulged before his death. The secret perhaps was only known–before his arrest–to his confessors; it came out when he was arrested by the Viceroy as a coiner of false money. Like de la Cloche, he was pious, though not much turns on that. If Armanni’s information is correct, if, when taken, the man wrote to the General of the Jesuits–who knew de la Cloche’s handwriting–we can scarcely escape the inference that he was de la Cloche.
On the other hand is the monstrous will. Unworldly as de la Cloche may have been, he can hardly have fancied that Wales was the appanage of a bastard of the Crown; and he certainly knew that ‘the province of Monmouth’ already gave a title to his younger brother, the duke, born in 1649. Yet the testator claims Wales or Monmouth for his unborn child. Again, de la Cloche may not have known who his mother was. But not only can no Mary, or Mary Henrietta, of the Lennox family be found, except the impossible Lady Mary who was younger than de la Cloche; but we observe no trace of the presence of any d’Aubigny, or even of any Stewart, male or female, at the court of the Prince of Wales in Jersey, in 1646.*
*See Hoskins, Charles II. in the Channel islands (Bentley, London, 1854).
The names of the suite are given by Dr. Hoskins from the journal (MS.) of Chevalier, a Jersey man, and from the Osborne papers. No Stewart or Stuart occurs, but, in a crowd of some 3,000 refugees, there MAY have been a young lady of the name. Lady Fanshaw, who was in Jersey, is silent. The will is absurd throughout, but whether it is all of the dying pretender’s composition, whether it may not be a thing concocted by an agent of the Corona family, is another question.
It is a mere conjecture, suggested by more than one inquirer, as by Mr. Steuart, that the words ‘Signora D. Maria Stuardo della famiglia delli Baroni di S. Marzo,’ refer to the Lennox family, which would naturally be spoken of as Lennox, or as d’Aubigny. About the marquisate of Juvigny (which cannot mean the dukedom of d’Aubigny) we have said enough. In short, the whole will is absurd, and it is all but inconceivable that the real de la Cloche could have been so ignorant as to compose it.
So the matter stands; one of two hypotheses must be correct–the Naples man was de la Cloche or he was not–yet either hypothesis is almost impossible.*
*I was at first inclined to suppose that the de la Cloche papers in the Gesu–the letters of Charles II. and the note of the Queen of Sweden–were forgeries, part of an impostor’s apparatus, seized at Naples and sent to Oliva for inspection. But the letters– handwriting and royal seal apart–show too much knowledge of Charles’s secret policy to have been feigned. We are not told that the certificates of de la Cloche’s birth were taken from James Stuart in prison, and, even if he possessed them, as Armanni says he did, he may have stolen them, and they may have been restored by the Viceroy of Naples, as we said, to the Jesuits. As to whether Charles II. paid his promised subscription to the Jesuit building fund, Father Boero says: ‘We possess a royal letter, proving that it was abundant’ (Boero, Istoria etc., p. 56, note 1), but he does not print the letter; and Mr. Brady speaks now of extant documents proving the donation, and now of ‘a traditional belief that Charles was a benefactor of the Jesuit College.’
It may be added that, on December 27, 1668, Charles wrote to his sister, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans: ‘I assure you that nobody does, nor shall, know anything of it here’ (of his intended conversion and secret dealings with France) ‘but my selfe, and that one person more, till it be fitte to be publique. . .’ ‘That one person more’ is not elsewhere referred to in Charles’s known letters to his sister, unless he be ‘he that came last, and delivered me your letter of the 9th December; he has given me a full account of what he was charged with, and I am very well pleased with what he tells me’ (Whitehall, December 14, 1668).
This mysterious person, the one sharer of the King’s secret, may be de la Cloche, if he could have left England by November 18, visited Rome, and returned to Paris by December 9. If so, de la Cloche may have fulfilled his mission. Did he return to Italy, and appear in Naples in January or February 1669? (See Madame, by Julia Cartwright, pp. 274, 275, London, 1894.)
IX. THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘FISHER’S GHOST’
Everybody has heard about ‘Fisher’s Ghost.’ It is one of the stock ‘yarns’ of the world, and reappears now and again in magazines, books like ‘The Night Side of Nature,’ newspapers, and general conversation. As usually told, the story runs thus: One Fisher, an Australian settler of unknown date, dwelling not far from Sydney, disappeared. His overseer, like himself an ex-convict, gave out that Fisher had returned to England, leaving him as plenipotentiary. One evening a neighbour (one Farley), returning from market, saw Fisher sitting on the fence of his paddock, walked up to speak to him, and marked him leave the fence and retreat into the field, where he was lost to sight. The neighbour reported Fisher’s return, and, as Fisher could nowhere be found, made a deposition before magistrates. A native tracker was taken to the fence where the pseudo Fisher sat, discovered ‘white man’s blood’ on it, detected ‘white man’s fat’ on the scum of a pool hard by, and, finally, found ‘white man’s body’ buried in a brake. The overseer was tried, condemned, and hanged after confession.
Such is the yarn: occasionally the ghost of Fisher is said to have been viewed several times on the fence.
Now, if the yarn were true, it would be no proof of a ghost. The person sitting on the fence might be mistaken for Fisher by a confusion of identity, or might be a mere subjective hallucination of a sort recognised even by official science as not uncommon. On the other hand, that such an illusion should perch exactly on the rail where ‘white man’s blood’ was later found, would be a very remarkable coincidence. Finally, the story of the appearance might be explained as an excuse for laying information against the overseer, already suspected on other grounds. But while this motive might act among a Celtic population, naturally credulous of ghosts, and honourably averse to assisting the law (as in Glenclunie in 1749), it is not a probable motive in an English Crown colony, as Sydney then was. Nor did the seer inform against anybody.
The tale is told in ‘Tegg’s Monthly Magazine’ (Sydney, March 1836); in ‘Household Words’ for 1853; in Mr. John Lang’s book, ‘Botany Bay’ (about 1840), where the yarn is much dressed up; and in Mr. Montgomery Martin’s ‘History of the British Colonies,’ vol. iv. (1835). Nowhere is a date given, but Mr. Martin says that the events occurred while he was in the colony. His most intimate surviving friend has often heard him tell the tale, and discuss it with a legal official, who is said to have been present at the trial of the overseer.* Other living witnesses have heard the story from a gentleman who attended the trial. Mr. Martin’s narrative given as a lowest date, the occurrences were before 1835. Moreover, the yarn of the ghost was in circulation before that year, and was accepted by a serious writer on a serious subject. But we have still no date for the murder.
*So the friend informs me in a letter of November 1896.
That date shall now be given. Frederick Fisher was murdered by George Worrall, his overseer, at Campbelltown on June 16 (or 17), 1826. After that date, as Fisher was missing, Worrall told various tales to account for his absence. The trial of Worrall is reported in the ‘Sydney Gazette’ of February 5, 1827. Not one word is printed about Fisher’s ghost; but the reader will observe that there is a lacuna in the evidence exactly where the ghost, if ghost there were, should have come in. The search for Fisher’s body starts, it will be seen, from a spot on Fisher’s paddock-fence, and the witness gives no reason why that spot was inspected, or rather no account of how, or by whom, sprinkled blood was detected on the rail. Nobody saw the murder committed. Chief-Justice Forbes said, in summing up (on February 2, 1827), that the evidence was purely circumstantial. We are therefore so far left wholly in the dark as to why the police began their investigations at a rail in a fence.
At the trial Mr. D. Cooper deposed to having been owed 80 pounds by Fisher. After Fisher’s disappearance Cooper frequently spoke to Worrall about this debt, which Worrall offered to pay if Cooper would give up to him certain papers (title-deeds) of Fisher’s in his possession. Worrall even wrote, from Banbury Curran, certifying Cooper of Fisher’s departure from the colony, which, he said, he was authorised to announce. Cooper replied that he would wait for his 80 pounds if Fisher were still in the country. Worrall exhibited uneasiness, but promised to show a written commission to act for Fisher. This document he never produced, but was most anxious to get back Fisher’s papers and to pay the 80 pounds. This arrangement was refused by Cooper.
James Coddington deposed that on July 8, 1826, when Fisher had been missing for three weeks, Worrall tried to sell him a colt, which Coddington believed to be Fisher’s. Worrall averred that Fisher had left the country. A few days later Worrall showed Coddington Fisher’s receipt for the price paid to him by Worrall for the horse. ‘Witness, from having seen Fisher write, had considerable doubt as to the genuineness of the receipt.’
James Hamilton swore that in August 1826 he bluntly told Worrall that foul play was suspected; he ‘turned pale, and endeavoured to force a smile.’ He merely said that Fisher ‘was on salt water,’ but could not or would not name his ship. A receipt to Worrall from Fisher was sworn to by Lewis Solomon as a forgery.
Samuel Hopkins, who lived under Fisher’s roof, last saw Fisher on June 17, 1826 (June 16 may be meant), in the evening. Some other people, including one Lawrence, were in the house, they left shortly after Fisher went out that evening, and later remarked on the strangeness of his not returning. Nathaniel Cole gave evidence to the same effect. Fisher, in short, strolled out on June 17 (16?), 1826, and was seen no more in the body.
Robert Burke, of Campbelltown, constable, deposed to having apprehended Worrall. We may now give in full the evidence as to the search for Fisher’s body on October 20, 1826.
Here let us first remark that Fisher’s body was not easily found. A reward for its discovery was offered by Government on September 27, 1826, when Fisher had been dead for three months, and this may have stimulated all that was immortal of Fisher to perch on his own paddock-rail, and so draw attention to the position of his body. But on this point we have no information, and we proceed to real evidence. From this it appears that though a reward was offered on September 27, the local magistrates (to whom the ghost-seer went, in the yarn) did not bid their constable make SPECIAL researches till October 20, apparently after the seer told his tale.
‘George Leonard, a constable at Campbelltown, stated that by order of the bench of the magistrates he commenced a search for the body of the deceased on the 20th of October last: witness WENT TO A PLACE WHERE SOME BLOOD WAS SAID TO HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED, and saw traces of it on several rails of a fence at the corner of the deceased’s paddock adjoining the fence of Mr. Bradbury, and about fifty rods from prisoner’s house: witness proceeded to search with an iron rod over the ground, when two black natives came up and joined in the search till they came to a creek where one of them saw something on the water: a man named Gilbert, a black native, went into the water, and scumming some of the top with a leaf, which he afterwards tasted, called out that “there was the fat of a white man” [of which he was clearly an amateur]: they then proceeded to another creek about forty or fifty yards farther up, STILL LED BY THE NATIVES, when one of them struck the rod into some marshy ground and called out that “there was something there:” a spade was immediately found, and the place dug, when the first thing that presented itself was the left hand of a man lying on his side, which witness, from a long acquaintance with him, immediately declared to be the hand of Frederick Fisher: the body was decayed a little, particularly the under-jaw: witness immediately informed Mr. William Howe and the Rev. Mr. Reddall, and obtained a warrant to apprehend the parties who were supposed to be concerned in the murder; the coroner was sent for, and, the body being taken out of the earth the next morning, several fractures were found in the head: an inquest was held, and a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown was returned: witness particularly examined the fence: there appeared to have been a fire made under the lower rail, as if to burn out the mark: the blood seemed as if it were sprinkled over the rails. . . .
‘The declaration of the prisoner’ (Worrall) ‘was put in and read: it stated that, on the evening of the 17th of June, a man named Lawrence got some money from the deceased, and together with four others went to a neighbouring public-house to drink: that after some time they returned, and the prisoner being then outside the house, and not seen by the others, he saw two of them enter, whilst the other two, one of whom was Lawrence, remained at the door: the prisoner then went down to the bottom of the yard, and after a little time heard a scuffle, and saw Lawrence and the others drag something along the yard, which they struck several times. The prisoner then came forward, and called out to know who it was. One of them replied, “It is a dog.” The prisoner coming up said, “It is Fisher, and you have prevented him from crying out any more.” They said they had murdered him in order to possess themselves of what money he had, and bound the prisoner by a solemn pledge not to reveal it.
‘For the prisoner Nathaniel Boom deposed: he knew deceased, and intended to institute a prosecution against him for forgery when he disappeared.
‘Chief-justice summed up: observed it was a case entirely of circumstances. The jury were first to consider if identity of body with Fisher was satisfactorily established. If not: no case. If so: they would then consider testimony as affecting prisoner. Impossible, though wholly circumstantial, for evidence to be stronger. He offered no opinion, but left case to jury.
‘The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Sentence of death passed.’
‘February 6, 1827. Sydney Gazette.
‘George Worrall, convicted on Friday last of murder of F. Fisher, yesterday suffered the last penalty of the law. Till about 5 o’clock on the morning of his execution, he persisted in asserting his innocence, when he was induced to confess to a gentleman who had sat up with him during the night, that he alone had perpetrated the murder, but positively affirmed it was not his intention at the time to do so.’
We need not follow Worrall’s attempts to explain away the crime as an accident. He admitted that ‘he had intended to hang Lawrence and Cole.’
It is a curious case. WHY WAS NOBODY INTERROGATED ABOUT THE DISCOVERY, ON THE RAIL, OF BLOOD THREE MONTHS OLD, if not four months? What was the apparent date of the fire under the rail? How did the ghost-story get into circulation, and reach Mr. Montgomery Martin (1835)?
To suggest a solution of these problems, we have a precisely analogous case in England.
On October 25, 1828, one William Edden, a market-gardener, did not come home at night. His wife rushed into the neighbouring village, announcing that she had seen her husband’s ghost; that he had a hammer, or some such instrument, in his hand; that she knew he had been hammered to death on the road by a man whose name she gave, one Tyler. Her husband was found on the road, between Aylesbury and Thame, killed by blows of a blunt instrument, and the wife in vain repeatedly invited the man, Joseph Tyler, to come and see the corpse. Probably she believed that it would bleed in his presence, in accordance with the old superstition. All this the poor woman stated on oath at an inquiry before the magistrates, reported in the Buckinghamshire county paper of August 29, 1829.
Here is her evidence, given at Aylesbury Petty Sessions, August 22, before Lord Nugent, Sir J. D. King, R. Brown, Esq., and others:
‘”After my husband’s corpse was brought home, I sent to Tyler, for some reasons I had, to come and see the corpse. I sent for him five or six times. I had some particular reason for sending for him which I never did divulge. . . . I will tell my reasons if you gentlemen ask me, in the face of Tyler, even if my life should be in danger for it. When I was ironing a shirt, on the Saturday night my husband was murdered, something came over me–something rushed over me–and I thought my husband came by me. I looked up, and I thought I heard the voice of my husband come from near my mahogany table, as I turned from my ironing. I ran out and said, ‘Oh dear God! my husband is murdered, and his ribs are broken.’ I told this to several of my neighbours. Mrs. Chester was the first to whom I told it. I mentioned it also at the Saracen’s Head.”
‘Sir J. D. King.–“Have you any objection to say why you thought your husband had been murdered?”
‘”No! I thought I saw my husband’s apparition and the man that had done it, and that man was Tyler, and that was the reason I sent for him. . . . When my neighbours asked me what was the matter when I ran out, I told them that I had seen my husband’s apparition. . . . When I mentioned it to Mrs. Chester, I said: ‘My husband is murdered, and his ribs are broken; I have seen him by the mahogany table.’ I did not tell her who did it. . . . I was always frightened, since my husband had been stopped on the road.” (The deceased Edden had once before been waylaid, but was then too powerful for his assailants.) “In consequence of what I saw, I went in search of my husband, until I was taken so ill I could go no further.”
‘Lord Nugent.–“What made you think your husband’s ribs were broken?”
‘”He held up his hand like this” (holds up her arm), “and I saw a hammer, or something like a hammer, and it came into my mind that his ribs were broken.”
‘Sewell stated that the murder was accomplished by means of a hammer. The examination was continued on August 31 and September 13; and finally both prisoners were discharged for want of sufficient evidence. Sewell declared that he had only been a looker-on, and his accusations against Tyler were so full of prevarications that they were not held sufficient to incriminate him. The inquiry was again resumed on February 11, 1830, and Sewell, Tyler, and a man named Gardner were committed for trial.
‘The trial (see “Buckingham Gazette,” March 13, 1830) took place before Mr. Baron Vaughan and a grand jury at the Buckingham Lent Assizes, March 5, 1830; BUT IN THE REPORT OF MRS. EDDEN’S EVIDENCE NO MENTION IS MADE OF THE VISION.
‘Sewell and Tyler were found guilty, and were executed, protesting their innocence, on March 8, 1830.
‘Miss Browne, writing to us [Mr. Gurney] from Farnham Castle, in January 1884, gives an account of the vision which substantially accords with that here recorded, adding:–
‘”The wife persisted in her account of the vision; consequently the accused was taken up, and, with some circumstantial evidence in addition to the woman’s story, committed for trial by two magistrates–my father, Colonel Robert Browne, and the Rev. Charles Ackfield.
‘”The murderer was convicted at the assizes, and hanged at Aylesbury.
‘”It may be added that Colonel Browne was remarkably free from superstition, and was a thorough disbeliever in ‘ghost stories.'”‘*
*From Phantasms of the Living, Gurney and Myers, vol. ii. p. 586.
Now, in the report of the trial at assizes in 1830 there is not one word about the ‘ghost,’ though he is conspicuous in the hearing at petty sessions. The parallel to Fisher’s case is thus complete. And the reason for omitting the ghost in a trial is obvious. The murderers of Sergeant Davies of Guise’s, slain in the autumn of 1749 in Glenclunie, were acquitted by an Edinburgh jury in 1753 in face of overpowering evidence of their guilt, partly because two Highland witnesses deposed to having seen the ghost of the sergeant, partly because the jury were Jacobites. The prisoners’ counsel, as one of them told Sir Walter Scott, knew that their clients were guilty. A witness had seen them in the act. But the advocate (Lockhart, a Jacobite) made such fun out of the ghost that an Edinburgh jury, disbelieving in the spectre, and not loving the House of Hanover, very logically disregarded also the crushing evidence for a crime which was actually described in court by an eye-witness.
Thus, to secure a view of the original form of the yarn of Fisher’s Ghost, what we need is what we are not likely to get–namely, a copy of the depositions made before the bench of magistrates at Campbelltown in October 1826.
For my own part, I think it highly probable that the story of Fisher’s Ghost was told before the magistrates, as in the Buckinghamshire case, and was suppressed in the trial at Sydney.
Worrall’s condemnation is said to have excited popular discontent, as condemnations on purely circumstantial evidence usually do. That dissatisfaction would be increased if a ghost were publicly implicated in the matter, just as in the case of Davies’s murder in 1749. We see how discreetly the wraith or ghost was kept out of the Buckinghamshire case at the trial, and we see why, in Worrall’s affair, no questions were asked as to the discovery of sprinkled blood, not proved by analysis to be human, on the rail where Fisher’s ghost was said to perch.
I had concluded my inquiry here, when I received a letter in which Mr. Rusden kindly referred me to his ‘History of Australia’ (vol. ii. pp. 44, 45). Mr. Rusden there gives a summary of the story, in agreement with that taken from the Sydney newspaper. He has ‘corrected current rumours by comparison with the words of a trustworthy informant, a medical man, who lived long in the neighbourhood, and attended Farley [the man who saw Fisher’s ghost] on his death-bed. He often conversed with Farley on the subject of the vision which scared him. . . . These facts are compiled from the notes of Chief-Justice Forbes, who presided at the trial, with the exception of the references to the apparition, which, although it led to the discovery of Fisher’s body, could not be alluded to in a court of justice, or be adduced as evidence.’* There is no justice for ghosts.
*Thanks to the kindness of the Countess of Jersey, and the obliging researches of the Chief Justice of New South Wales, I have received a transcript of the judge’s notes. They are correctly analysed by Mr. Rusden.
An Australian correspondent adds another example. Long after Fisher’s case, this gentleman was himself present at a trial in Maitland, New South Wales. A servant-girl had dreamed that a missing man told her who had killed him, and where his body was concealed. She, being terrified, wanted to leave the house, but her mistress made her impart the story to the chief constable, a man known to my informant, who also knew, and names, the judge who tried the case. The constable excavated at the spot pointed out in the dream, unearthed the body, and arrested the criminal, who was found guilty, confessed, and was hanged. Not a word was allowed to be said in court about the dream. All the chief constable was permitted to say was, that ‘from information received’ he went to Hayes’s farm, and so forth.
Here, then, are two parallels to Fisher’s ghost, and very hard on psychical science it is that ghostly evidence should be deliberately burked through the prejudices of lawyers. Mr. Suttar, in his ‘Australian Stories Retold’ (Bathurst, 1887), remarks that the ghost is not a late mythical accretion in Fisher’s story. ‘I have the authority of a gentleman who was intimately connected with the gentleman who had the charge of the police when the murder was done, that Farley’s story did suggest the search for the body in the creek.’ But Mr. Suttar thinks that Farley invented the tale as an excuse for laying information. That might apply, as has been said, to Highland witnesses in 1753, but hardly to an Englishman in Australia. Besides, if Farley knew the facts, and had the ghost to cover the guilt of peaching, WHY DID HE NOT PEACH? He only pointed to a fence, and, but for the ingenious black Sherlock Holmes, the body would never have been found. What Farley did was not what a man would do who, knowing the facts of the crime, and lured by a reward of 20 pounds, wished to play the informer under cover of a ghost-story.
The case for the ghost, then, stands thus, in my opinion. Despite the silence preserved at the trial, Farley’s ghost-story was really told before the discovery of Fisher’s body, and led to the finding of the body. Despite Mr. Suttar’s theory (of information laid under shelter of a ghost-story), Farley really had experienced an hallucination. Mr. Rusden, who knew his doctor, speaks of his fright, and, according to the version of 1836, he was terrified into an illness. Now, the hallucination indicated the exact spot where Fisher was stricken down, and left traces of his blood, which no evidence shows to have been previously noticed. Was it, then, a fortuitous coincidence that Farley should be casually hallucinated exactly at the one spot–the rail in the fence–where Fisher had been knocked on the head? That is the question, and the state of the odds may be reckoned by the mathematician.
As to the Australian servant-girl’s dream about the place where another murdered body lay, and the dreams which led to the discovery of the Red Barn and Assynt murders, and (May 1903) to the finding of the corpse of a drowned girl at Shanklin, all these may be mere guesses by the sleeping self, which is very clever at discovering lost objects.
X. THE MYSTERY OF LORD BATEMAN
Ever and again, in the literary and antiquarian papers, there flickers up debate as to the Mystery of Lord Bateman. This problem in no way concerns the existing baronial house of Bateman, which, in Burke, records no predecessor before a knight and lord mayor of 1717. Our Bateman comes of lordlier and more ancient lineage. The question really concerns ‘The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Illustrated by George Cruikshank, London: Charles Tilt, Fleet Street. And Mustapha Syried, Constantinople. MDCCCXXXIX.’
The tiny little volume in green cloth, with a design of Lord Bateman’s marriage ceremony, stamped in gold, opens with a ‘Warning to the Public, concerning the Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman.’ The Warning is signed George Cruikshank, who, however, adds in a postscript: ‘The above is not my writing.’ The ballad follows, and then comes a set of notes, mainly critical. The author of the Warning remarks: ‘In some collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty, which, I am told, bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following Epic Poem.’
Again, the text of the ballad, here styled ‘The Famous History of Lord Bateman,’ with illustrations by Thackeray, ‘plain’ (the original designs were coloured), occurs in the Thirteenth Volume of the Biographical Edition of Thackeray’s works. (pp. lvi-lxi).
The problems debated are: ‘Who wrote the Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman, and who wrote the Notes?’ The disputants have not shown much acquaintance with ballad lore in general.
First let us consider Mr. Thackeray’s text of the ballad. It is closely affiliated to the text of ‘The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman,’ whereof the earliest edition with Cruikshank’s illustrations was published in 1839.* The edition here used is that of David Bryce and Son, Glasgow (no date).
*There are undated cheap broadside copies, not illustrated, in the British Museum.
Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, in his ‘Life of Cruikshank,’ tells us that the artist sang this ‘old English ballad’ at a dinner where Dickens and Thackeray were present. Mr. Thackeray remarked: ‘I should like to print that ballad with illustrations,’ but Cruikshank ‘warned him off,’ as he intended to do the thing himself. Dickens furnished the learned notes. This account of what occurred was given by Mr. Walter Hamilton, but Mr. Sala furnished another version. The ‘authorship of the ballad,’ Mr. Sala justly observed, ‘is involved in mystery.’ Cruikshank picked it up from the recitation of a minstrel outside a pot-house. In Mr. Sala’s opinion, Mr. Thackeray ‘revised and settled the words, and made them fit for publication.’ Nor did he confine himself to the mere critical work; he added, in Mr. Sala’s opinion, that admired passage about ‘The young bride’s mother, who never before was heard to speak so free,’ also contributing ‘The Proud Young Porter,’ Jeames. Now, in fact, both the interpellation of the bride’s mamma, and the person and characteristics of the proud young porter, are of unknown antiquity, and are not due to Mr. Thackeray–a scholar too conscientious to ‘decorate ‘ an ancient text. Bishop Percy did such things, and Scott is not beyond suspicion; but Mr. Thackeray, like Joseph Ritson, preferred the authentic voice of tradition. Thus, in the text of the Biographical Edition, he does not imitate the Cockney twang, phonetically rendered in the version of Cruikshank. The second verse, for example, runs thus:
Cruikshank:
He sail-ed east, he sail-ed vest, Until he came to famed Tur-key,
Vere he vos taken and put to prisin, Until his life was quite wea-ry.
Thackeray:
He sailed East, and he sailed West, Until he came to proud Turkey,
Where he was taken and put to prison, Until his life was almost weary.
There are discrepancies in the arrangement of the verses, and a most important various reading.
Cruikshank:
Now sevin long years is gone and past, And fourteen days vell known to me; She packed up all her gay clouthing, And swore Lord Bateman she would go see.
To this verse, in Cruikshank’s book, a note (not by Cruikshank) is added:
‘”Now sevin long years is gone and past, And fourteen days well known to me.
In this may be recognised, though in a minor degree, the same gifted hand that portrayed the Mussulman, the pirate, the father, and the bigot, in two words (“This Turk”).
‘”The time is gone, the historian knows it, and that is enough for the reader. This is the dignity of history very strikingly exemplified.”‘
That note to Cruikshank’s text is, like all the delightful notes, if style is evidence, not by Dickens, but by Thackeray. Yet, in his own text, with an exemplary fidelity, he reads: ‘And fourteen days well known to THEE.’ To whom? We are left in ignorance; and conjecture, though tempting, is unsafe. The reading of Cruikshank, ‘vell known to ME’–that is, to the poet–is confirmed by the hitherto unprinted ‘Lord Bedmin.’ This version, collected by Miss Wyatt Edgell in 1899, as recited by a blind old woman in a workhouse, who had learned it in her youth, now lies before the present writer. He owes this invaluable document to the kindness of Miss Wyatt Edgell and Lady Rosalind Northcote. Invaluable it is, because it proves that Lord Bateman (or Bedmin) is really a volkslied, a popular and current version of the ancient ballad. ‘Famed Turkey’ becomes ‘Torquay’ in this text, probably by a misapprehension on the part of the collector or reciter. The speech of the bride’s mother is here omitted, though it occurs in older texts; but, on the whole, the blind old woman’s memory has proved itself excellent. In one place she gives Thackeray’s reading in preference to that of Cruikshank, thus:
Cruikshank:
Ven he vent down on his bended knee.
Thackeray:
Down on his bended knees fell he.
Old Woman:
Down on his bended knee fell he.
We have now ascertained the following facts: Cruikshank and Thackeray used a text with merely verbal differences, which was popular among the least educated classes early in last century. Again, Thackeray contributed the notes and critical apparatus to Cruikshank’s version. For this the internal evidence of style is overpowering: no other man wrote in the manner and with the peculiar humour of Mr. Titmarsh. In the humble opinion of the present writer these Notes ought to be appended to Mr. Thackeray’s version of ‘Lord Bateman.’ Finally, Mr. Sala was wrong in supposing that Mr. Thackeray took liberties with the text received from oral tradition.
What was the origin of that text? Professor Child, in the second part of his ‘English and Scottish Popular Ballads’* lays before us the learning about Lord Bateman, Lord Bedmin, Young Bicham, Young Brechin, Young Bekie, Young Beichan and Susie Pie (the heroine, Sophia, in Thackeray), Lord Beichan, Young Bondwell, and Markgraf Backenweil; for by all these names is Lord Bateman known. The student must carefully note that ‘Thackeray’s List of Broadsides,’ cited, is NOT by Mr. W. M. Thackeray.
*Pt. ii. p. 454 et seq., and in various other places.
As the reader may not remember the incidents in the Thackeray, Cruikshank, and Old Woman version (which represents an ancient ballad, now not so much popularised as vulgarised), a summary may be given. Lord Bateman went wandering: ‘his character, at this time, and his expedition, would seem to have borne a striking resemblance to those of Lord Byron. . . . SOME foreign country he wished to see, and that was the extent of his desire; any foreign country would answer his purpose–all foreign countries were alike to him.’- -(Note, apud Cruikshank.) Arriving in Turkey (or Torquay) he was taken and fastened to a tree by his captor. He was furtively released by the daughter of ‘This Turk.’ ‘The poet has here, by that bold license which only genius can venture upon, surmounted the extreme difficulty of introducing any particular Turk, by assuming a foregone conclusion in the reader’s mind; and adverting, in a casual, careless way, to a Turk hitherto unknown as to an old acquaintance. . . . “THIS Turk he had” is a master-stroke, a truly Shakespearian touch’–(Note.) The lady, in her father’s cellar (‘Castle,’ Old Woman’s text), consoles the captive with ‘the very best wine,’ secretly stored, for his private enjoyment, by the cruel and hypocritical Mussulman. She confesses the state of her heart, and inquires as to Lord Bateman’s real property, which is ‘half Northumberland.’ To what period in the complicated mediaeval history of the earldom of Northumberland the affair belongs is uncertain.
The pair vow to be celibate for seven years, and Lord Bateman escapes. At the end of the period, Sophia sets out for Northumberland, urged, perhaps, by some telepathic admonition. For, on arriving at Lord Bateman’s palace (Alnwick Castle?), she summons the proud porter, announces herself, and finds that her lover has just celebrated a marriage with another lady. In spite of the remonstrances of the bride’s mamma, Lord Bateman restores that young lady to her family, observing
She is neither the better nor the worse for me.
So Thackeray and Old Woman. Cruikshank prudishly reads,
O you’ll see what I’ll do for you and she.
‘Lord Bateman then prepared another marriage, having plenty of superfluous wealth to bestow upon the Church.’–(Note.) All the rest was bliss.
The reader may ask: How did Sophia know anything about the obscure Christian captive? WHY did she leave home exactly in time for his marriage? How came Lord Bateman to be so fickle? The Annotator replies: ‘His lordship had doubtless been impelled by despair of ever recovering his lost Sophia, and a natural anxiety not to die without leaving an heir to his estate.’ Finally how was the difficulty of Sophia’s religion overcome?
To all these questions the Cockney version gives no replies, but the older forms of the ballad offer sufficient though varying answers, as we shall see.
Meanwhile one thing is plain from this analysis of the pot-house version of an old ballad, namely, that the story is constructed out of fragments from the great universal store of popular romance. The central ideas are two: first, the situation of a young man in the hands of a cruel captor (often a god, a giant, a witch, a fiend), but here–a Turk. The youth is loved and released (commonly through magic spells) by the daughter of the gaoler, god, giant, witch, Turk, or what not. In Greece, Jason is the Lord Bateman, Medea is the Sophia, of the tale, which was known to Homer and Hesiod, and was fully narrated by Pindar. THE OTHER YOUNG PERSON, the second bride, however, comes in differently, in the Greek. In far-off Samoa, a god is the captor.* The gaoler is a magician in Red Indian versions.**
*Turner’s ‘Samoa,’ p. 102.
**For a list, though an imperfect one, of the Captor’s Daughter story, see the Author’s Custom and Myth, pp. 86-102.
As a rule, in these tales, from Finland to Japan, from Samoa to Madagascar, Greece and India, the girl accompanies her lover in his flight, delaying the pursuer by her magic. In ‘Lord Bateman’ another formula, almost as widely diffused, is preferred.
The old true love comes back just after her lover’s wedding. He returns to her. Now, as a rule, in popular tales, the lover’s fickleness is explained by a spell or by a breach of a taboo. The old true love has great difficulty in getting access to him, and in waking him from a sleep, drugged or magical.
The bloody shirt I wrang for thee, The Hill o’ Glass I clamb for thee, And wilt thou no waken and speak to me?
He wakens at last, and all is well. In a Romaic ballad the deserted girl, meeting her love on his wedding-day, merely reminds him of old kindness. He answers–
Now he that will may scatter nuts, And he may wed that will,
But she that was my old true love Shall be my true love still.
This incident, the strange, often magically caused oblivion of the lover, whose love returns to him, like Sophia, at, or after, his marriage, is found in popular tales of Scotland, Norway, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and the Gaelic Western Islands. It does not occur in ‘Lord Bateman,’ where Mr. Thackeray suggests probable reasons for Lord Bateman’s fickleness. But the world-wide incidents are found in older versions of ‘Lord Bateman,’ from which they have been expelled by the English genius for the commonplace.
Thus, if we ask, how did Sophia at first know of Bateman’s existence? The lovely and delicate daughter of the Turk, doubtless, was unaware that, in the crowded dungeons of her sire, one captive of wealth, noble birth, and personal fascination, was languishing. The Annotator explains: ‘She hears from an aged and garrulous attendant, her only female adviser (for her mother died while she was yet an infant), of the sorrows and sufferings of the Christian captive.’ In ancient versions of the ballad another explanation occurs. She overhears a song which he sings about his unlucky condition. This account is in Young Bekie (Scottish: mark the name, Bekie), where France is the scene and the king’s daughter is the lady. The same formula of the song sung by the prisoner is usual. Not uncommon, too, is a TOKEN carried by Sophia when she pursues her lost adorer, to insure her recognition. It is half of her broken ring. Once more, why does Sophia leave home to find Bateman in the very nick of time? Thackeray’s version does not tell us; but Scottish versions do. ‘She longed fu’ sair her love to see.’ Elsewhere a supernatural being, ‘The Billy Blin,’ or a fairy, clad in green, gives her warning. The fickleness of the hero is caused, sometimes, by constraint, another noble ‘has his marriage,’ as his feudal superior, and makes him marry, but only in form.
There is a marriage in yonder hall, Has lasted thirty days and three, The bridegroom winna bed the bride, For the sake o’ one that’s owre the sea.
In this Scottish version, by the way, occurs–
Up spoke the young bride’s mother, Who never was heard to speak so free,
wrongly attributed to Mr. Thackeray’s own pen.
The incident of the magical oblivion which comes over the bridegroom occurs in Scandinavian versions of ‘Lord Bateman’ from manuscripts of the sixteenth century.* Finally, the religious difficulty in several Scottish versions is got over by the conversion and baptism of Sophia, who had professed the creed of Islam. That all these problems in ‘Lord Bateman’ are left unsolved is, then, the result of decay. The modern vulgar English version of the pot-house minstrel (known as ‘The Tripe Skewer,’ according to the author of the Introduction to Cruikshank’s version) has forgotten, has been heedless of, and has dropped the ancient universal elements of folk- tale and folk-song.
*Child, ii. 459-461.
These graces, it is true, are not too conspicuous even in the oldest and best versions of ‘Lord Bateman.’ Choosing at random, however, we find a Scots version open thus:
In the lands where Lord Beichan was born, Among the stately steps o’ stane, He wore the goud at his left shoulder, But to the Holy Land he’s gane.
That is not in the tone of the ditty sung by the Tripe Skewer. Again, in his prison,
He made na his moan to a stock,
He made na it to a stone,
But it was to the Queen of Heaven That he made his moan.
The lines are from a version of the North of Scotland, and, on the face of it, are older than the extirpation of the Catholic faith in the loyal North. The reference to Holy Land preserves a touch of the crusading age. In short, poor as they may be, the Scottish versions are those of a people not yet wholly vulgarised, not yet lost to romance. The singers have ‘half remembered and half forgot’ the legend of Gilbert Becket (Bekie, Beichan), the father of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Gilbert, in the legend, went to Holy Land, was cast into a Saracen’s prison, and won his daughter’s heart. He escaped, but the lady followed him, like Sophia, and, like Sophia, found and wedded him; Gilbert’s servant, Richard, playing the part of the proud young porter. Yet, as Professor Child justly observes, the ballad ‘is not derived from the legend,’ though the legend as to Gilbert Becket exists in a manuscript of about 1300. The Bateman motive is older than Gilbert Becket, and has been attached to later versions of the adventures of that hero. Gilbert Becket about 1300 was credited with a floating, popular tale of the Bateman sort, and out of his legend, thus altered, the existing ballads drew their ‘Bekie’ and ‘Beichan,’ from the name of Becket.
The process is: First, the popular tale of the return of the old true love; that tale is found in Greece, Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, Faroe, Spain, Germany, and so forth. Next, about 1300 Gilbert Becket is made the hero of the tale. Next, our surviving ballads retain a trace or two of the Becket form, but they are not derived from the Becket form. The fancy of the folk first evolved the situations in the story, then lent them to written literature (Becket’s legend, 1300), and thirdly, received the story back from written legend with a slight, comparatively modern colouring.
In the dispute as to the origin of our ballads one school, as Mr. T. F. Henderson and Professor Courthope, regard them as debris of old literary romances, ill-remembered work of professional minstrels.* That there are ballads of this kind in England, such as the Arthurian ballads, I do not deny. But in my opinion many ballads and popular tales are in origin older than the mediaeval romances, as a rule. As a rule the romances are based on earlier popular data, just as the ‘Odyssey’ is an artistic whole made up out of popular tales. The folk may receive back a literary form of its own ballad or story, but more frequently the popular ballad comes down in oral tradition side by side with its educated child, the literary romance on the same theme.
Cf. The Queen’s Marie.
Mr. Henderson has answered that the people is unpoetical. The degraded populace of the slums may be unpoetical, like the minstrel named ‘Tripe Skewer,’ and may deprave the ballads of its undegraded ancestry into such modern English forms as ‘Lord Bateman.’ But I think of the people which, in Barbour’s day, had its choirs of peasant girls chanting rural snatches on Bruce’s victories, or, in still earlier France, of Roland’s overthrow. If THEIR songs are attributed to professional minstrels, I turn to the Greece of 1830, to the Finland of to-day, to the outermost Hebrides of to-day, to the Arapahoes of Northern America, to the Australian blacks, among all of whom the people are their own poets and make their own dirges, lullabies, chants of victory, and laments for defeat. THESE peoples are not unpoetical. In fact, when I say that the people has been its own poet I do not mean the people which goes to music halls and reads halfpenny newspapers. To the true folk we owe the legend of Lord Bateman in its ancient germs; and to the folk’s degraded modern estate, crowded as men are in noisome streets and crushed by labour, we owe the Cockney depravation, the Lord Bateman of Cruikshank and Thackeray. Even that, I presume, being old, is now forgotten, except by the ancient blind woman in the workhouse. To the workhouse has come the native popular culture–the last lingering shadow of old romance. That is the moral of the ballad of Lord Bateman.
In an article by Mr. Kitton, in Literature (June 24, 1899, p. 699), this learned Dickensite says: ‘The authorship of this version’ (Cruikshank’s) ‘of an ancient ballad and of the accompanying notes has given rise to much controversy, and whether Dickens or Thackeray was responsible for them is still a matter of conjecture, although what little evidence there is seems to favour Thackeray.’
For the ballad neither Thackeray nor Dickens is responsible. The Old Woman’s text settles that question: the ballad is a degraded Volkslied. As to the notes, internal evidence for once is explicit. The notes are Thackeray’s. Any one who doubts has only to compare Thackeray’s notes to his prize poem on ‘Timbuctoo.’
The banter, in the notes, is academic banter, that of a university man, who is mocking the notes of learned editors. This humour is not the humour of Dickens, who, however, may very well have written the Introduction to Cruikshank’s version. That morceau is in quite a different taste and style. I ought, in fairness, to add the following note from Mr. J. B. Keene, which may be thought to overthrow belief in Thackeray’s authorship of the notes:–
Dear Sir,–Your paper in the ‘Cornhill’ for this month on the Mystery of Lord Bateman interested me greatly, but I must beg to differ from you as to the authorship of the Notes, and for this reason.
I have before me a copy of the first edition of the ‘Loving Ballad’ which was bought by my father soon after it was issued. At that time–somewhere about 1840–there was a frequent visitor at our house, named Burnett, who had married a sister of Charles Dickens, and who gave us the story of its production.
He said, as you state, that Cruikshank had got the words from a pot- house singer, but the locality he named was Whitechapel,* where he was looking out for characters. He added that Cruikshank sung or hummed the tune to him, and he gave it the musical notation which follows the preface. He also said that Charles Dickens wrote the notes. His personal connection with the work and his relation to Dickens are, I think, fair evidence on the question.
I am, dear Sir,
Yours truly,
J. B. KEENE.
Kingsmead House, 1 Hartham Road,
Camden Road, N., Feb. 13,1900.
Mr. Keene’s evidence may, perhaps, settle the question. But, if Dickens wrote the Introduction, that might be confused in Mr. Burnett’s memory with the Notes, from internal evidence the work of Thackeray. If not, then in the Notes we find a new aspect of the inexhaustible humour of Dickens. It is certain, at all events, that neither Dickens nor Thackeray was the author of the ‘Loving Ballad.’
P.S.–The preface to the ballad says Battle Bridge.
XI. THE QUEEN’S MARIE
Little did my mother think
That day she cradled me
What land I was to travel in,
Or what death I should die.
Writing to Mrs. Dunlop on January 25, 1790, Burns quoted these lines, ‘in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart.’ Mr. Carlyle is said, when young, to have written them on a pane of glass in a window, with a diamond, adding, characteristically, ‘Oh foolish Thee!’ In 1802, in the first edition of ‘The Border Minstrelsy,’ Scott cited only three stanzas from the same ballad, not including Burns’s verse, but giving
Yestreen the Queen had four Maries, The night she’ll hae but three,
There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael and me.
In later editions Sir Walter offered a made-up copy of the ballad, most of it from a version collected by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.
It now appeared that Mary Hamilton was the heroine, that she was one of Queen Marie’s four Maries, and that she was hanged for murdering a child whom she bore to Darnley. Thus the character of Mary Hamilton was ‘totally lost,’ and Darnley certainly ‘had not sufficient for two.’ Darnley, to be sure, told his father that ‘I never offended the Queen, my wife, in meddling with any woman in thought, let be in deed,’ and, whether Darnley spoke truth or not, there was, among the Queen’s Maries, no Mary Hamilton to meddle with, just as there was no Mary Carmichael.
The Maries were attendant on the Queen as children ever since she left Scotland for France. They were Mary Livingstone (mentioned as ‘Lady Livinston’ in one version of the ballad),* who married ‘John Sempill, called the Dancer,’ who, says Laing, ‘acquired the lands of Beltree, in Renfrewshire.’**
*Child, vol. iii. p. 389.
**Laing’s Knox, ii. 415, note 3.
When Queen Mary was a captive in England she was at odds with the Sempill pair about some jewels of hers in their custody. He was not a satisfactory character, he died before November 1581. Mary Fleming, early in 1587, married the famous William Maitland of Lethington, ‘being no more fit for her than I to be a page,’ says Kirkcaldy of Grange. Her life was wretched enough, through the stormy career and sad death of her lord. Mary Beaton, with whom Randolph, the English ambassador, used to flirt, married, in 1566, Ogilvy of Boyne, the first love of Lady Jane Gordon, the bride of Bothwell. Mary Seaton remained a maiden and busked the Queen’s hair during her English captivity. We last hear of her from James Maitland of Lethington, in 1613, living at Rheims, very old, ‘decrepid,’ and poor. There is no room in the Four for Mary Hamilton, and no mention of her appears in the records of the Court.
How, then, did Mary Hamilton find her way into the old ballad about Darnley and the Queen?
To explain this puzzle, some modern writers have denied that the ballad of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ is really old; they attribute it to the eighteenth century. The antiquary who launched this opinion was Scott’s not very loyal friend, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. According to him, a certain Miss Hambledon (no Christian name is given), being Maid of Honour to the Empress Catherine of Russia, had three children by an amour, and murdered all three. Peter the Great caused her to be, not hanged, but decapitated. Sharpe took his facts from ‘a German almanac,’ and says: ‘The Russian tragedy must be the original.’ The late Professor Child, from more authentic documents, dates Miss Hambledon’s or Hamilton’s execution on March 14, 1719. At that time, or nearly then, Charles Wogan was in Russia on a mission from the Chevalier de St. George (James III.), and through him the news might reach Scotland. Mr. Courthope, in his ‘History of English Poetry,’ followed Sharpe and Professor Child, and says: ‘It is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.’
The occurrence would not only be remarkable, but, as far as possibility goes in literature, would be impossible, for several reasons. One is that neither literary men nor mere garreteers and makers of street ballads appear, about 1719-1730, to have been capable of recapturing the simplicity and charm of the old ballad style, at its best, or anything near its best. There is no mistaking the literary touch in such ballads as Allan Ramsay handled, or in the imitation named ‘Hardyknute ‘ in Allan’s ‘Tea Table Miscellany,’ 1724. ‘It was the first poem I ever learned, the last I shall ever forget,’ said Scott, and, misled by boyish affection, he deemed it ‘just old enough,’ ‘a noble imitation.’* But the imitation can deceive nobody, and while literary imitators, as far as their efforts have reached us, were impotent to deceive, the popular Muse, of 1714-1730, was not attempting deception. Ballads of the eighteenth century were sarcastic, as in those on Sheriffmuir and in Skirving’s amusing ballad on Preston Pans, or were mere doggerel, or were brief songs to old tunes. They survive in print, whether in flying broadsides or in books, but, popular as is ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ in all its many variants (Child gives no less than eighteen), we do not know a single printed example before Scott’s made-up copy in the ‘Border Minstrelsy.’ The latest ballad really in the old popular manner known to me is that of ‘Rob Roy,’ namely, of Robin Oig and James More, sons of Rob Roy, and about their abduction of an heiress in 1752. This is a genuine popular poem, but in style and tone and versification it is wholly unlike ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ I scarcely hope that any one can produce, after 1680, a single popular piece which could be mistaken for a ballad of or near Queen Mary’s time.
*Lockhart, i. 114, x. 138.
The known person least unlike Mr. Courthope’s late ‘maker’ was ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie Leslie,’ ‘an old Aberdeenshire minstrel, the very last, probably, of the race,’ says Scott. Charlie died in 1782. He sang, and sold PRINTED ballads. ‘Why cannot you sing other songs than those rebellious ones?’ asked a Hanoverian Provost of Aberdeen. ‘Oh ay, but–THEY WINNA BUY THEM!’ said Charlie. ‘Where do you buy them?’ ‘Why, faur I get them cheapest.’ He carried his ballads in ‘a large harden bag, hung over his shoulder.’ Charlie had tholed prison for Prince Charles, and had seen Provost Morison drink the Prince’s health in wine and proclaim him Regent at the Cross of Aberdeen. If Charlie (who lived to be a hundred and two) composed the song, ‘Mussel-mou’d Charlie ‘ (‘this sang Charlie made hissel”), then this maker could never have produced ‘The Queen’s Marie,’ nor could any maker like him. His ballads were printed, as any successful ballad of 1719 would probably have been, in broadsides.* Against Mr. Child and Mr. Courthope, then, we argue that, after 1600, a marked decadence of the old ballad style set in- -that the old style (as far as is known) died soon after Bothwell Brig (1679), in the execrable ballads of both sides, such as ‘Philiphaugh,’ and that it soon was not only dead as a form in practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, about 1719-1730, compose ‘The Queen’s Marie’ in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed; but we ask for proof that new ballads were still composed in the ancient fashion.
*See, for example, Mr. Macquoid’s Jacobite Songs and Ballads, pp. 424, 510, with a picture of Charlie.
Secondly, WHY, and how tempted, would a popular poet of 1719 transfer a modern tragedy of Russia to the year 1563, or thereabouts? His public would naturally desire a ballad gazette of the mournful new tale, concerning a lass of Scottish extraction, betrayed, tortured, beheaded, at the far-off court of a Muscovite tyrant. The facts ‘palpitated with actuality,’ and, since Homer’s day, ‘men desire’ (as Homer says) ‘the new songs’ on the new events. What was gained by going back to Queen Mary? Would a popular ‘Musselmou’d Charlie’ even know, by 1719, the names of the Queen’s Maries? Mr. Courthope admits that ‘he may have been helped by some ballad,’ one of those spoken of, as we shall see, by Knox. If that ballad told the existing Marian story, what did the ‘maker’ add? If it did NOT, what did he borrow? No more than the names could he borrow, and no more than the name ‘Hamilton’ from the Russian tragedy could he add. One other thing he might be said to add, the verses in which Mary asks ‘the jolly sailors’ not to
‘Let on to my father and mother
But that I’m coming hame.’
This passage, according to Mr. Courthope, ‘was suggested partly by the fact of a Scotswoman being executed in Russia.’ C. K. Sharpe also says: ‘If Marie Hamilton was executed in Scotland, it is not likely’ (why not?) ‘that her relations resided beyond seas.’ They MAY have been in France, like many another Hamilton! Mr. Child says: ‘The appeal to the sailors shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land–not that of her ancestors.’ Yet the ballad makes her die in or near the Canongate! Moreover, the family of the Mary Hamilton of 1719 had been settled in Russia for generations, and were reckoned of the Russian noblesse. The verses, therefore, on either theory, are probably out of place, and are perhaps an interpolation suggested to some reciter (they only occur in some of the many versions) by a passage in ‘The Twa Brithers.’*
*Child, i. 439.
We now reach the most important argument for the antiquity of ‘The Queen’s Marie.’ Mr. Courthope has theoretically introduced as existing in, or after, 1719, ‘makers’ who could imitate to deception the old ballad style. Now Maidment remarks that ‘this ballad was popular in Galloway, Selkirkshire, Lanarkshire, and Aberdeen, AND THE VERY STRIKING DISCREPANCIES GO FAR TO REMOVE EVERY SUSPICION OF FABRICATION.’ Chambers uses (1829) against Sharpe the same argument of ‘universal diffusion in Scotland.’ Neither Mr. Child nor Mr. Courthope draws the obvious inferences from the extraordinary discrepancies in the eighteen variants. Such essential discrepancies surely speak of a long period of oral recitation by men or women accustomed to interpolate, alter, and add, in the true old ballad manner. Did such rhapsodists exist after 1719? Old Charlie, for one, did not sing or sell the old ballads. Again, if the ballad (as it probably would be in 1719) was PRINTED, or even if it was not, could the variations have been evolved between 1719 and 1802?
These variations are numerous, striking, and fundamental. In many variants even the name of the heroine does not tally with that of the Russian maid of honour. That most important and telling coincidence wholly disappears. In a version of Motherwell’s, from Dumbartonshire, the heroine is Mary Myle. In a version known to Scott (‘Minstrelsy,’ 1810, iii. 89, note), the name is Mary Miles. Mr. Child also finds Mary Mild, Mary Moil, and Lady Maisry. This Maisry is daughter of the Duke of York! Now, the Duke of York whom alone the Scottish people knew was James Stuart, later James II. Once more the heroine is daughter of the Duke of Argyll, therefore a Campbell. Or she is without patronymic, and is daughter of a lord or knight of the North, or South, or East, and one of her sisters is a barber’s wife, and her father lives in England!–(Motherwell.) She, at least, might invoke ‘Ye mariners, mariners, mariners!’ (as in Scott’s first fragment) not to carry her story. Now we ask whether, after the ringing tragedy of Miss Hamilton in Russia, in the year of grace 1719, contemporaries who heard the woeful tale could, between 1719 and 1820, call the heroine–(1) Hamilton; (2) Mild, Moil, Myle, Miles; (3) make her a daughter of the Duke of York, or of the Duke of Argyll, or of lords and of knights from all quarters of the compass, and sister-in-law to an English barber, also one of the Queen’s ‘serving-maids.’ We at least cannot accept those numerous and glittering contradictions as corruptions which could be made soon after the Russian events, when the true old ballad style was dead.
We now produce more startling variations. The lover is not only ‘the King,’ ‘the Prince,’ Darnley, ‘the highest Stuart o’ a’,’ but he is also that old offender, ‘Sweet Willie,’ or he is Warrenston (Warriston?). Mary is certainly not hanged (the Russian woman was beheaded) away from her home; she dies in Edinburgh, near the Tolbooth, the Netherbow, the Canongate, and–
O what will my three brothers say When they COME HAME frae sea,
When they see three locks o’ my yellow hair Hinging under a gallows tree?
It is impossible here to give all the variations. Mary pulls, or does not pull, or her lover pulls, the leaf of the Abbey, or ‘savin,’ or other tree; the Queen is ‘auld,’ or not ‘auld;’ she kicks in Mary’s door and bursts the bolts, or does nothing so athletic and inconsistent with her advanced age. The heroine does, or does not, appeal vainly to her father. Her dress is of all varieties. She does, or does not, go to the Tolbooth and other places. She is, or is not, allured to Edinburgh, ‘a wedding for to see.’ Her infanticide is variously described, or its details are omitted, and the dead body of the child is found in various places, or not found at all. Though drowned in the sea, it is between the bolster and the wall, or under the blankets! She expects, or does not expect, to be avenged by her kin. The king is now angry, now clement–inviting Mary to dinner! Mary is hanged, or (Buchan’s MS.) is not hanged, but is ransomed by Warrenston, probably Johnston of Warriston! These are a few specimens of variations in point of fact: in language the variations are practically countless. How could they arise, if the ballad is later than 1719?
We now condescend to appeal to statistics. We have examined the number of variants published by Mr. Child in his first six volumes, on ballads which have, or may have, an historical basis. Of course, the older and more popular the ballads, the more variants do we expect to discover–time and taste producing frequent changes. Well, of ‘Otterburn’ Mr. Child has five versions; of the ‘Hunting of the Cheviot’ he has two, with minor modifications indicated by letters from the ‘lower case.’ Of ‘Gude Wallace’ he has eight. Of ‘Johnnie Armstrong’ he has three. Of ‘Kinmont Willie’ he has one. Of ‘The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray’ he has two. Of ‘Johnnie Cock’ he has thirteen. Of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ he has eighteen. And of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ (counting Burns’s solitary verse and other brief fragments) Mr. Child has eighteen versions or variants
Thus a ballad made, ex hypothesi Sharpiana, in or after 1719, has been as much altered in oral tradition as the most popular and perhaps the oldest historical ballad of all, ‘Sir Patrick Spens,’ and much more than any other of the confessedly ancient semi- historical popular poems. The historical event which may have suggested ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is ‘plausibly,’ says Mr. Child, fixed in 1281: it is the marriage of Margaret of Scotland to Eric, King of Norway. Others suggest so late a date as the wooing of Anne of Denmark by James VI. Nothing is known. No wonder, then, that in time an orally preserved ballad grows rich in variants. But that a ballad of 1719 should, in eighty modern non-balladising years, become as rich in extant variants, and far more discrepant in their details, as ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ is a circumstance for which we invite explanation.
Will men say, ‘The later the ballad, the more it is altered in oral tradition’? If so, let them, by all means, produce examples! We should, on this theory, have about a dozen ‘Battles of Philiphaugh,’ and at least fifteen ‘Bothwell Brigs,’ a poem, by the way, much in the old manner, prosaically applied, and so recent that, in art at least, it was produced after the death of the Duke of Monmouth, slain, it avers, by the machinations of Claverhouse! Of course we are not asking for exact proportions, since many variants of ballads may be lost, but merely for proof that, the later a ballad is, the more variants of it occur. But this contention is probably impossible, and the numerous variations in ‘The Queen’s Marie’ are really a proof of long existence in oral tradition, and contradict the theory espoused by Mr. Child, who later saw the difficulty involved in his hypothesis.
This argument, though statistical, is, we think, conclusive, and the other considerations which we have produced in favour of the antiquity of ‘The Queen’s Marie’ add their cumulative weight.
We have been, in brief, invited to suppose that, about 1719, a Scot wrote a ballad on an event in contemporary Russian Court life; that (contrary to use and wont) he threw the story back a century and a half; that he was a master of an old style, in the practice of his age utterly obsolete and not successfully imitated; that his poem became universally popular, and underwent, in eighty years, even more vicissitudes than most other ballads encounter in three or five centuries. Meanwhile it is certain that there had been real ancient ballads, contemporary with the Marian events–ballads on the very Maries two or three of whom appear in the so-called poem of 1719; while exactly the same sort of scandal as the ballad records had actually occurred at Queen Mary’s Court in a lower social rank. The theory of Mr. Child is opposed to our whole knowledge of ballad literature, of its age, decadence (about 1620-1700), and decease (in the old kind) as a popular art.
To agree with Mr. Child, we must not only accept one great ballad- poet, born at least fifty years too late; we must not only admit that such a poet would throw back his facts for a century and a half; but we must also conceive that the balladising humour, with its ancient methods, was even more vivacious in Scotland for many years after 1719 than, as far as we know, it had ever been before. Yet there is no other trace known to us of the existence of the old balladising humour and of the old art in all that period. We have no such ballad about the English captain shot by the writer’s pretty