← catalogue

Historical Mysteries

by Andrew Lang · English · Gutenberg #18679 · 477,651 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Historical Mysteries
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Historical Mysteries

Author: Andrew Lang


        
Release date: June 25, 2006 [eBook #18679]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18679

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Linda Cantoni, and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORICAL MYSTERIES ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Linda Cantoni, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









HISTORICAL MYSTERIES


BY

ANDREW LANG


WITH A FRONTISPIECE

_SECOND EDITION_

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1905

[All rights reserved]


[Illustration: William Smith 1754 Pinx. Mac Ardell. Mezzo.

Elizabeth Canning.

London: Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place, S.W.]




PREFACE


These Essays, which appeared, with two exceptions, in _The Cornhill
Magazine_, 1904, have been revised, and some alterations, corrections,
and additions have been made in them. 'Queen Oglethorpe,' in which
Miss Alice Shield collaborated, doing most of the research, is
reprinted by the courteous permission of the editor, from _Blackwood's
Magazine_. A note on 'The End of Jeanne de la Motte,' has been added
as a sequel to 'The Cardinal's Necklace:' it appeared in _The Morning
Post_, the Editor kindly granting leave to republish.

The author wishes to acknowledge the able assistance of Miss E.M.
Thompson, who made researches for him in the British Museum and at the
Record Office.




CONTENTS


                                                          PAGE

I. THE CASE OF ELIZABETH CANNING                             1

II. THE MURDER OF ESCOVEDO                                  32

III. THE CAMPDEN MYSTERY                                    55

IV. THE CASE OF ALLAN BRECK                                 75

V. THE CARDINAL'S NECKLACE                                  99

VI. THE MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER: THE CHILD OF EUROPE      118

VII. THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY                                 143

VIII. THE STRANGE CASE OF DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME              170

IX. THE CASE OF CAPTAIN GREEN                              193

X. QUEEN OGLETHORPE (_in collaboration with Miss
     Alice Shield_)                                        214

XI. THE CHEVALIER D'ÉON                                    238

XII. SAINT-GERMAIN THE DEATHLESS                           256

XIII. THE MYSTERY OF THE KIRKS                             277

XIV. THE END OF JEANNE DE LA MOTTE                         297

PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH CANNING. _Frontispiece._




HISTORICAL MYSTERIES




I

_THE CASE OF ELIZABETH CANNING_

    Don't let your poor little
      Lizzie be blamed!

    THACKERAY.


'Everyone has heard of the case of Elizabeth Canning,' writes Mr. John
Paget; and till recently I agreed with him. But five or six years ago
the case of Elizabeth Canning repeated itself in a marvellous way, and
then but few persons of my acquaintance had ever heard of that
mysterious girl.

The recent case, so strange a parallel to that of 1753, was this: In
Cheshire lived a young woman whose business in life was that of a
daily governess. One Sunday her family went to church in the morning,
but she set off to skate, by herself, on a lonely pond. She was never
seen of or heard of again till, in the dusk of the following Thursday,
her hat was found outside of the door of her father's farmyard. Her
friend discovered her further off in a most miserable condition,
weak, emaciated, and with her skull fractured. Her explanation was
that a man had seized her on the ice, or as she left it, had dragged
her across the fields, and had shut her up in a house, from which she
escaped, crawled to her father's home, and, when she found herself
unable to go further, tossed her hat towards the farm door. Neither
such a man as she described, nor the house in which she had been
imprisoned, was ever found. The girl's character was excellent,
nothing pointed to her condition being the result _d'une orgie
échevelée_; but the neighbours, of course, made insinuations, and a
lady of my acquaintance, who visited the girl's mother, found herself
almost alone in placing a charitable construction on the adventure.

My theory was that the girl had fractured her skull by a fall on the
ice, had crawled to and lain in an unvisited outhouse of the farm, and
on that Thursday night was wandering out, in a distraught state, not
wandering in. Her story would be the result of her cerebral
condition--concussion of the brain.

It was while people were discussing this affair, a second edition of
Elizabeth Canning's, that one found out how forgotten was Elizabeth.

On January 1, 1753, Elizabeth was in her eighteenth year. She was the
daughter of a carpenter in Aldermanbury; her mother, who had four
younger children, was a widow, very poor, and of the best character.
Elizabeth was short of stature, ruddy of complexion, and, owing to an
accident in childhood--the falling of a garret ceiling on her
head--was subject to fits of unconsciousness on any alarm. On learning
this, the mind flies to hysteria, with its accompaniment of diabolical
falseness, for an explanation of her adventure. But hysteria does not
serve the turn. The girl had been for years in service with a Mr.
Wintlebury, a publican. He gave her the highest character for honesty
and reserve; she did not attend to the customers at the bar, she kept
to herself, she had no young man, and she only left Wintlebury's for a
better place--at a Mr. Lyon's, a near neighbour of her mother. Lyon, a
carpenter, corroborated, as did all the neighbours, on the points of
modesty and honesty.

On New Year's Day, 1753, Elizabeth wore her holiday best--'a purple
masquerade stuff gown, a white handkerchief and apron, a black quilted
petticoat, a green undercoat, black shoes, blue stockings, a white
shaving hat with green ribbons,' and 'a very ruddy colour.' She had
her wages, or Christmas-box, in her pocket--a golden half guinea in a
little box, with three shillings and a few coppers, including a
farthing. The pence she gave to three of her little brothers and
sisters. One boy, however, 'had huffed her,' and got no penny. But she
relented, and, when she went out, bought for him a mince-pie. Her
visit of New Year's Day was to her maternal aunt, Mrs. Colley, living
at Saltpetre Bank (Dock Street, behind the London Dock). She meant to
return in time to buy, with her mother, a cloak, but the Colleys had a
cold early dinner, and kept her till about 9 P.M. for a hot supper.

Already, at 9 P.M., Mr. Lyon had sent to Mrs. Canning's to make
inquiries; the girl was not wont to stay out so late on a holiday.
About 9 P.M., in fact, the two Colleys were escorting Elizabeth as far
as Houndsditch.

The rest is mystery!

On Elizabeth's non-arrival Mrs. Canning sent her lad, a little after
ten, to the Colleys, who were in bed. The night was passed in anxious
search, to no avail; by six in the morning inquiries were vainly
renewed. Weeks went by. Mrs. Canning, aided by the neighbours,
advertised in the papers, mentioning a report of shrieks heard from a
coach in Bishopsgate Street in the small morning hours of January 2.
The mother, a Churchwoman, had prayers put up at several churches, and
at Mr. Wesley's chapel. She also consulted a cheap 'wise man,' whose
aspect alarmed her, but whose wisdom took the form of advising her to
go on advertising. It was later rumoured that he said the girl was in
the hands of 'an old black woman,' and would return; but Mrs. Canning
admitted nothing of all this. Sceptics, with their usual acuteness,
maintained that the disappearance was meant to stimulate charity, and
that the mother knew where the daughter was; or, on the other hand,
the daughter had fled to give birth to a child in secret, or for
another reason incident to 'the young and gay,' as one of the counsel
employed euphemistically put the case. The medical evidence did not
confirm these suggestions. Details are needless, but these theories
were certainly improbable. The character of La Pucelle was not more
stainless than Elizabeth's.

About 10.15 P.M. on January 29, on the Eve of the Martyrdom of King
Charles--as the poor women dated it--Mrs. Canning was on her knees,
praying--so said her apprentice--that she might behold even if it were
but an apparition of her daughter; such was her daily prayer. It was
as in Wordsworth's _Affliction of Margaret_:

    I look for ghosts, but none will force
      Their way to me; 'tis falsely said
    That ever there was intercourse
      Between the living and the dead!

At that moment there was a sound at the door. The 'prentice opened it,
and was aghast; the mother's prayer seemed to be answered, for there,
bleeding, bowed double, livid, ragged, with a cloth about her head,
and clad in a dirty dressing-jacket and a filthy draggled petticoat,
was Elizabeth Canning. She had neglected her little brother that
'huffed her' on New Year's Day, but she had been thinking of him, and
now she gave her mother for him all that she had--the farthing!

You see that I am on Elizabeth's side: that farthing touch, and
another, with the piety, honesty, loyalty, and even the superstition
of her people, have made me her partisan, as was Mr. Henry Fielding,
the well-known magistrate.

Some friends were sent for, Mrs. Myers, Miss Polly Lyon, daughter of
her master, and others; while busybodies flocked in, among them one
Robert Scarrat, a toiler, who had no personal knowledge of Elizabeth.
A little wine was mulled; the girl could not swallow it, emaciated as
she was. Her condition need not be described in detail, but she was
very near her death, as the medical evidence, and that of a midwife
(who consoled Mrs. Canning on one point), proves beyond possibility of
cavil.

The girl told her story; but what did she tell? Mr. Austin Dobson, in
_The Dictionary of National Biography_, says that her tale 'gradually
took shape under the questions of sympathising neighbours,' and
certainly, on some points, she gave affirmative answers to leading
questions asked by Robert Scarrat. The difficulty is that the
neighbours' accounts of what Elizabeth said in her woful condition
were given when the girl was tried for perjury in April-May 1754. We
must therefore make allowance for friendly bias and mythopoeic
memory. On January 31, 1753, Elizabeth made her statement before
Alderman Chitty, and the chief count against her is that what she told
Chitty did not tally with what the neighbours, in May 1754, swore that
she told them when she came home on January 29, 1753. This point is
overlooked by Mr. Paget in his essay on the subject.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Puzzles and Paradoxes_, pp. 317-336, Blackwoods, 1874.]

On the other hand, by 1754 the town was divided into two factions,
believers and disbelievers in Elizabeth; and Chitty was then a
disbeliever. Chitty took but a few notes on January 31, 1753. 'I did
not make it so distinct as I could wish, not thinking it could be the
subject of so much inquiry,' he admitted in 1754. Moreover, the notes
which he then produced were _not_ the notes which he made at the time,
'but what I took since from that paper I took then' (January 31, 1753)
'of hers and other persons that were brought before me.' This is not
intelligible, and is not satisfactory. If Elizabeth handed in a paper,
Chitty should have produced it in 1754. If he took notes of the
evidence, why did he not produce the original notes?

These notes, made when, and from what source, is vague, bear that
Elizabeth's tale was this: At a dead wall by Bedlam, in Moorfields,
about ten P.M., on January 1, 1753, two men stripped her of gown,
apron, and hat, robbed her of thirteen shillings and sixpence, 'struck
her, stunned her, and pushed her along Bishopsgate Street.' She lost
consciousness--one of her 'fits'--and recovered herself (near Enfield
Wash). Here she was taken to a house, later said to be 'Mother
Wells's,' where 'several persons' were. Chitty, unluckily, does not
say what sort of persons, and on that point all turns. She was asked
'to do as they did,' 'a woman forced her upstairs into a room, and cut
the lace of her stays,' told her there were bread and water in the
room, and that her throat would be cut if she came out. The door was
locked on her. (There was no lock; the door was merely bolted.) She
lived on fragments of a quartern loaf and water '_in a pitcher_,' with
the mince-pie bought for her naughty little brother. She escaped about
four in the afternoon of January 29. In the room were 'an old stool or
two, _an old picture_ over the chimney,' two windows, an old table,
and so on. She forced a pane in a window, 'and got out on a small shed
of boards or penthouse,' and so slid to the ground. She did not say,
the alderman added, that there was any hay in the room. Of bread there
were 'four or five' or 'five or six pieces.' '_She never mentioned the
name of Wells._' Some one else did that at a venture. 'She said she
could tell nothing of the woman's name.' The alderman issued a warrant
against this Mrs. Wells, apparently on newspaper suggestion.

The chief points against Elizabeth were that, when Wells's place was
examined, there was no penthouse to aid an escape, and no old picture.
But, under a wretched kind of bed, supporting the thing, was a
picture, on wood, of a Crown. Madam Wells had at one time used this
loyal emblem as a sign, she keeping a very ill-famed house of call.
But, in December 1745, when certain Highland and Lowland gentlemen
were accompanying bonny Prince Charlie towards the metropolis, Mrs.
Wells removed into a room the picture of the Crown, as being apt to
cause political emotions. This sign may have been 'the old picture.'
As to hay, there _was_ hay in the room later searched; but penthouse
there was none.

That is the worst point in the alderman's notes, of whatever value
these enigmatic documents may be held.

One Nash, butler to the Goldsmiths' Company, was present at the
examination before Chitty on January 31, 1753. He averred, in May
1754, what Chitty did not, that Elizabeth spoke of the place of her
imprisonment as 'a little, square, darkish room,' with 'a few old
pictures.' Here the _one_ old picture of the notes is better evidence,
if the notes are evidence, than Nash's memory. But I find that he was
harping on 'a few old pictures' as early as March 1753. Elizabeth said
she hurt her ear in getting out of the window, and, in fact, it was
freshly cut and bleeding when she arrived at home.

All this of Nash is, so far, the better evidence, as next day,
February 1, 1753, when a most tumultuous popular investigation of the
supposed house of captivity was made, he says that he and others,
finding the dungeon not to be square, small, and darkish, but a long,
narrow slit of a loft, half full of hay, expressed disbelief. Yet it
was proved that he went on suggesting to Lyon, Elizabeth's master,
that people should give money to Elizabeth, and 'wished him success.'
The proof was a letter of his, dated February 10, 1753. Also, Nash,
and two like-minded friends, hearing Elizabeth perjure herself, as
they thought, at the trial of Mrs. Wells (whom Elizabeth never
mentioned to Chitty), did not give evidence against her--on the most
absurdly flimsy excuses. One man was so horrified that, in place of
denouncing the perjury, he fled incontinent! Another went to a dinner,
and Nash to Goldsmiths' Hall, to his duties as butler. Such was then
the vigour of their scepticism.

On the other hand, at the trial in 1754 the neighbours reported
Elizabeth's tale as told on the night when she came home, more dead
than alive. Mrs. Myers had known Elizabeth for eleven years, 'a very
sober, honest girl as any in England.' Mrs. Myers found her livid, her
fingers 'stood crooked;' Mrs. Canning, Mrs. Woodward, and Polly Lyon
were then present, and Mrs. Myers knelt beside Elizabeth to hear her
story. It was as Chitty gave it, till the point where she was carried
into a house. The 'several persons' there, she said, were 'an elderly
woman and two young ones.' Her stays were cut by the old woman. She
was then thrust upstairs into a room, wherein was _hay_, _a pitcher of
water_, and bread in pieces. Bread may have been brought in, water
too, while she slept, a point never noted in the trials. She 'heard
the name of Mother Wills, or Wells, mentioned.'

Now Scarrat, in 1754, said that he, being present on January 29, 1753,
and hearing of the house, 'offered to bet a guinea to a farthing that
it was Mother Wells's.' But Mrs. Myers believed that Elizabeth had
mentioned hearing that name earlier; and Mrs. Myers must have heard
Scarrat, if he suggested it, before Elizabeth named it. The point is
uncertain.

Mrs. Woodward was in Mrs. Canning's room a quarter of an hour after
Elizabeth's arrival. The girl said she was almost starved to death in
a house on the Hertfordshire road, which she knew by seeing the
Hertford coach, with which she was familiar, go by. The woman who cut
her stays was 'a tall, black, swarthy woman.' Scarrat said 'that was
not Mrs. Wells,' which was fair on Scarrat's part. Elizabeth described
the two young women as being one fair, the other dark; so Scarrat
swore. Wintlebury, her old master, and several others corroborated.

If these accounts by Mrs. Myers, Mrs. Woodward, Scarrat, Wintlebury,
and others are trustworthy, then Elizabeth Canning's narrative is
true, for she found the two girls, the tall, swarthy woman, the hay,
and the broken water-pitcher, and almost everything else that she had
mentioned on January 29, at Mother Wells's house when it was visited
on February 1. But we must remember that most accounts of what
Elizabeth said on January 29 and on January 31 are fifteen months
after date, and are biassed on both sides.

To Mother Wells's the girl was taken on February 1, in what a company!
The coach, or cab, was crammed full, some friends walked, several
curious citizens rode, and, when Elizabeth arrived at the house, Nash,
the butler, and other busybodies had made a descent on it. The officer
with the warrant was already there. Lyon, Aldridge, and Hague were
with Nash in a cab, and were met by others 'riding hard,' who had
seized the people found at Mrs. Wells's. There was a rabble of persons
on foot and on horse about the door.

On entering the doorway the parlour was to your left, the house
staircase in front of you, on your right the kitchen, at the further
end thereof was a door, and, when that was opened, a flight of stairs
led to a long slit of a loft which, Nash later declared, did not
answer to Elizabeth's description, especially as there was hay, and,
before Chitty, Elizabeth had mentioned none. There was a filthy kind
of bed, on which now slept a labourer and his wife, Fortune and Judith
Natus. Nash kept talking about the hay, and one Adamson rode to meet
Elizabeth, and came back saying that she said there _was_ hay. By
Adamson's account he only asked her, 'What kind of place was it?' and
she said, 'A wild kind of place with hay in it,' as in the neighbours'
version of her first narrative. Mrs. Myers, who was in the coach,
corroborated Adamson.

The point of the sceptics was that till Adamson rode back to her on
her way to Wells's house she had never mentioned hay. They argued that
Adamson had asked her, 'Was there hay in the room?' and that she,
taking the hint, had said 'Yes!' By May 1754 Adamson and Mrs. Myers,
who was in the cab with Elizabeth, would believe that Adamson had
asked 'What kind of place is it?' and that Elizabeth then spoke,
without suggestion, of the hay. The point would be crucial, but nobody
in 1754 appears to have remembered that on February 21, three weeks
after the event, at the trial of Mother Wells, Adamson had given
exactly the same evidence as in May 1754. 'I returned to meet her, and
asked her about the room. She described the room with some hay in it
... an odd sort of an empty room.'

Arriving at Mother Wells's, Elizabeth, very faint, was borne in and
set on a dresser in the kitchen. Why did she not at once say, 'My room
was up the stairs, beyond the door at the further end of the room'? I
know not, unless she was dazed, as she well might be. Next she, with a
mob of the curious, was carried into the parlour, where were all the
inmates of the house. She paid no attention to Mrs. Wells, but at once
picked out a tall old woman huddled over the fire smoking a pipe. She
did this, by the sceptical Nash's evidence, instantly and without
hesitation. The old woman rose. She was 'tall and swarthy,' a gipsy,
and according to all witnesses inconceivably hideous, her underlip was
'the size of a small child's arm,' and she was marked with some
disease. 'Pray look at this face,' she said; 'I think God never made
such another.' She was named Mary Squires. She added that on January 1
she was in Dorset--'at Abbotsbury,' said her son George, who was
present.

In 1754 thirty-six people testified to Mary Squires's presence in
Dorset, or to meeting her on her way to London, while twenty-seven, at
Enfield alone, swore as positively that they had seen her and her
daughter at or near Mrs. Wells's, and had conversed with her, between
December 18, 1752, and the middle of January. Some of the Enfield
witnesses were of a more prosperous and educated class than the
witnesses for the gipsy. Many, on both sides, had been eager to swear,
indeed, many had made affidavits as early as March 1753.

This business of the cross-swearing is absolutely inexplicable; on
both sides the same entire certainty was exhibited, as a rule, yet the
woman was unmistakable, as she justly remarked. The gipsy, at all
events, had her _alibi_ ready at once; her denial was as prompt and
unhesitating as Elizabeth's accusation. But, if guilty, she had
enjoyed plenty of time since the girl's escape to think out her line
of defence. If guilty, it was wiser to allege an _alibi_ than to
decamp when Elizabeth made off, for she could not hope to escape
pursuit. George Squires, her son, so prompt with his 'at Abbotsbury on
January 1,' could not tell, in May 1754, where he had passed the
Christmas Day before that New Year's Day, and Christmas is a notable
day. Elizabeth also recognised in Lucy Squires, the gipsy's daughter,
and in Virtue Hall, the two girls, dark and fair, who were present
when her stays were cut.

After the recognition, Elizabeth was carried through the house, and,
according to Nash, in the loft up the stairs from the kitchen she
said, in answer to his question, 'This is the room, for here is the
hay I lay upon, but I think there is more of it.' She also identified
the pitcher with the broken mouth, which she certainly mentioned to
Chitty, as that which held her allowance of water. A chest, or nest,
of drawers she declared that she did not remember. An attempt was made
to suggest that one of her party brought the pitcher in with him to
confirm her account. This attempt failed; but that she had mentioned
the pitcher was admitted. Mrs. Myers, in May 1754, quoted Elizabeth's
words as to there being more hay exactly in the terms of Nash. Mrs.
Myers was present in the loft, and added that Elizabeth 'took her
foot, and put the hay away, and showed the gentlemen two holes, and
said they were in the room when she was in it before.'

On February 7, Elizabeth swore to her narrative, formally made out by
her solicitor, before the author of _Tom Jones_, and Mr. Fielding, by
threats of prosecution if she kept on shuffling, induced Virtue Hall
to corroborate, after she had vexed his kind heart by endless
prevarications. But as Virtue Hall was later 'got at' by the other
side and recanted, we leave her evidence on one side.

On February 21-26 Mary Squires was tried at the Old Bailey and
condemned to death, Virtue Hall corroborating Elizabeth. Mrs. Wells
was branded on the hand. Three Dorset witnesses to the gipsy's _alibi_
were not credited, and Fortune and Judith Natus did not appear in
court, though subpoenaed. In 1754 they accounted for this by their
fear of the mob. The three sceptics, Nash, Hague, and Aldridge, held
their peace. The Lord Mayor, Sir Crispin Gascoyne, who was on the
bench at the trial of Squires and Wells, was dissatisfied. He secured
many affidavits which seem unimpeachable, for the gipsy's _alibi_, and
so did the other side for her presence at Enfield. He also got at
Virtue Hall, or rather a sceptical Dr. Hill got at her and handed her
over to Gascoyne. She, as we saw, recanted. George Squires, the
gipsy's son, with an attorney, worked up the evidence for the gipsy's
_alibi_; she received a free pardon, and on April 29, 1754, there
began the trial of Elizabeth Canning for 'wilful and corrupt perjury.'

Mr. Davy, opening for the Crown, charitably suggested that Elizabeth
had absconded 'to preserve her character,' and had told a romantic
story to raise money! 'And, having by this time subdued all remains of
virtue, she preferred the offer of money, though she must wade through
innocent blood'--that of the gipsy--'to attain it.'

These hypotheses are absurd; her character certainly needed no saving.

Mr. Davy then remarked on the gross improbabilities of the story of
Elizabeth. They are glaring, but, as Fielding said, so are the
improbabilities of the facts. Somebody had stripped and starved and
imprisoned the girl; that is absolutely certain. She was brought
'within an inch of her life.' She did not suffer all these things to
excite compassion; that is out of the question. Had she plunged into
'gaiety' on New Year's night, the consequences would be other than
instant starvation. They might have been 'guilty splendour.' She had
been most abominably misused, and it was to the last degree improbable
that any mortal should so misuse an honest quiet lass. But the grossly
improbable had certainly occurred. It was next to impossible that, in
1856, a respectable-looking man should offer to take a little boy for
a drive, and that, six weeks later, the naked body of the boy, who had
been starved to death, should be found in a ditch near Acton. But the
facts occurred.[2] To Squires and Wells a rosy girl might prove more
valuable than a little boy to anybody.

[Footnote 2: Paget, p. 332.]

That Elizabeth could live for a month on a loaf did not surprise Mrs.
Canning. 'When things were very hard with her,' said Mrs. Canning,
'the child had lived on half a roll a day.' This is that other touch
which, with the story of the farthing, helps to make me a partisan of
Elizabeth.

Mr. Davy said that on January 31, before Chitty, Elizabeth 'did not
pretend to certainty' about Mrs. Wells. She never did at any time; she
neither knew, nor affected to know, anything about Mrs. Wells. She had
only seen a tall, swarthy woman, a dark girl, and a fair girl, whom
she recognised in the gipsy, her daughter, and Virtue Hall. Mr. Davy
preferred Nash's evidence to that of all the neighbours, and even to
Chitty's notes, when Nash and Chitty varied. Mr. Davy said that Nash
'withdrew his assistance' after the visit to the house. It was proved,
we saw, by his letter of February 10, that he did not withdraw his
assistance, which, like that of Mr. Tracy Tupman, took the form of
hoping that other people would subscribe money.

Certain varieties of statement as to the time when Elizabeth finished
the water proved fatal, and the penthouse of Chitty's notes was played
for all that it was worth. It was alleged, as matter of fact, that
Adamson brought the broken pitcher into the house--this by Mr. Willes,
later Solicitor-General. Now, for three months before February 1,
Adamson had not seen Elizabeth Canning, nor had he heard her
description of the room. He was riding, and could not carry a gallon
pitcher in his coat pocket. He could not carry it in John Gilpin's
fashion; and, whatever else was denied, it was admitted that from the
first Elizabeth mentioned the pitcher. The statement of Mr. Willes,
that Adamson brought in the pitcher, was one that no barrister should
have made.

The Natus pair were now brought in to say that they slept in the loft
during the time that Elizabeth said she was there. As a reason for not
giving evidence at the gipsy's trial, they alleged fear of the mob, as
we saw.

The witnesses for the gipsy's _alibi_ were called. Mrs. Hopkins, of
South Parrot, Dorset, was not very confident that she had seen the
gipsy at her inn on December 29, 1752. She, if Mary Squires she was,
told Mrs. Hopkins that they 'sold hardware'; in fact they sold soft
ware, smuggled nankin and other stuffs. Alice Farnham recognised the
gipsies, whom she had seen after New Christmas (new style). 'They said
they would come to see me after the Old Christmas holidays'--which is
unlikely!

Lucy Squires, the daughter, was clean, well dressed, and, _teste_ Mr.
Davy, she was pretty. She was not called.

George Squires was next examined. He had been well tutored as to what
he did _after_ December 29, but could not tell where he was on
Christmas Day, four days earlier! His memory only existed from the
hour when he arrived at Mrs. Hopkins's inn, at South Parrot (December
29, 1752). His own counsel must have been amazed; but in
cross-examination Mr. Morton showed that, for all time up to December
29, 1752, George's memory was an utter blank. On January 1, George
dined, he said, at Abbotsbury, with one Clarke, a sweetheart of his
sister. They had two boiled fowls. But Clarke said they had only 'a
part of a fowl between them.' There was such a discrepancy of evidence
here as to time on the part of one of the gipsy's witnesses that Mr.
Davy told him he was drunk. Yet he persisted that he kissed Lucy
Squires, at an hour when Lucy, to suit the case, could not have been
present.

There was documentary evidence--a letter of Lucy to Clarke, from
Basingstoke. It was dated January 18, 1753, but the figure after 175
was torn off the postmark; that was the only injury to the letter. Had
there not been a battalion of as hard swearers to the presence of the
gipsies at Enfield in December-January 1752-1753 as there was to their
absence from Enfield and to their presence in Dorset, the gipsy party
would have proved their case. As matters stand, we must remember that
the Dorset evidence had been organised by a solicitor, that the route
was one which the Squires party habitually used; that by the
confession of Mr. Davy, the prosecuting counsel, the Squires family
'stood in' with the smuggling interest, compact and unscrupulous. They
were 'gipsies dealing in smuggled goods,' said Mr. Davy. Again, while
George Squires had been taught his lesson like a parrot, the
prosecution dared not call his sister, pretty Lucy, as a witness.
They said that George was 'stupid,' but that Lucy was much more dull.
The more stupid was George, the less unlikely was he to kidnap
Elizabeth Canning as prize of war after robbing her. But she did not
swear to him.

As to the presence of the gipsies at Mrs. Wells's, at Enfield, as
early as January 19, Mrs. Howard swore. Her husband lived on his own
property, and her house, with a well, which she allowed the villagers
to use, was opposite Mrs. Wells's. Mrs. Howard had seen the gipsy girl
at the well, and been curtsied to by her, at a distance of three or
four yards. She had heard earlier from her servants of the arrival of
the gipsies, and had 'looked wishfully,' or earnestly, at them. She
was not so positive as to Mary Squires, whom she had seen at a greater
distance.

William Headland swore to seeing Mary Squires on January 9; he fixed
the date by a market-day. Also, on the 12th, he saw her in Mrs.
Wells's house. He picked up a blood-stained piece of thin lead under
the window from which Elizabeth escaped, and took it to his mother,
who corroborated. Samuel Story, who knew Mary Squires from of old, saw
her on December 22 in White Webs Lane, so called from the old house
noted as a meeting-place of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. Story was
a retired clockmaker. Mr. Smith, a tenant of the Duke of Portland, saw
Mary Squires in his cowhouse on December 15, 1752. She wanted leave
to camp there, as she had done in other years. The gipsies then lost a
pony. Several witnesses swore to this, and one swore to conversations
with Mary Squires about the pony. She gave her name, and said that it
was on the clog by which the beast was tethered.

Loomworth Dane swore to Mary Squires, whom he had observed so closely
as to note a great hole in the heel of her stocking. The date was Old
Christmas Day, 1752. Dane was landlord of the Bell, at Enfield, and a
maker of horse-collars. Sarah Star, whose house was next to Mrs.
Wells's, saw Mary Squires in her own house on January 18 or 19; Mary
wanted to buy pork, and hung about for three-quarters of an hour,
offering to tell fortunes. Mrs. Star got rid of her by a present of
some pig's flesh. She fixed the date by a document which she had given
to Miles, a solicitor; it was not in court. James Pratt swore to talk
with Mary Squires before Christmas as to her lost pony; she had then a
man with her. He was asked to look round the court to see if the man
was present, whereon George Squires ducked his head, and was rebuked
by the prosecuting counsel, Mr. Davy, who said 'It does not look
well.' It was hardly the demeanour of conscious innocence. But Pratt
would not swear to him. Mary Squires told Pratt that she would consult
'a cunning-man about the lost pony,' and Mr. Nares foolishly asked why
a cunning woman should consult a cunning man? 'One black fellow will
often tell you that he can and does something magical, whilst all the
time he is perfectly aware that he cannot, and yet firmly believes
that some other man can really do it.' So write Messrs. Spencer and
Gillen in their excellent book on _The Native Tribes of Central
Australia_ (p. 130); and so it was with the gipsy, who, though a 'wise
woman,' believed in a 'wise man.'

This witness (Pratt) said, with great emphasis: 'Upon my oath, that is
the woman.... I am positive in my conscience, and I am sure that it
was no other woman; this is the woman I saw at that blessed time.'
Moreover, she gave him her name as the name on the clog of the lost
pony. The affair of the pony was just what would impress a man like
Pratt, and, on the gipsies' own version, they had no pony with them in
their march from Dorset.

All this occurred _before_ Pratt left his house, which was on December
22, 'three days before New Christmas.' He then left Enfield for
Cheshunt, and his evidence carries conviction.

In some other cases witnesses were very stupid--could not tell in what
month Christmas fell. One witness, an old woman, made an error,
confusing January 16 with January 23. A document on which she relied
gave the later date.

If witnesses on either side were a year out in their reckoning, the
discrepancies would be accountable; but Pratt, for example, could not
forget when he left Enfield for Cheshunt, and Farmer Smith and Mrs.
Howard could be under no such confusion of memory. It may be
prejudice, but I rather prefer the Enfield evidence in some ways, as
did Mr. Paget. In others, the Dorset evidence seems better.

Elizabeth had sworn to having asked a man to point out the way to
London after she escaped into the lane beside Mrs. Wells's house. A
man, Thomas Bennet, swore that on January 29, 1753, he met 'a
miserable, poor wretch, about half-past four,' 'near the ten-mile
stone,' in a lane. She asked her way to London; 'she said she was
affrighted by the tanner's dog.' The tanner's house was about two
hundred yards nearer London, and the prosecution made much of this, as
if a dog, with plenty of leisure and a feud against tramps, could not
move two hundred yards, or much more, if he were taking a walk abroad,
to combat the object of his dislike. Bennet knew that the dog was the
tanner's; probably he saw the dog when he met the wayfarer, and it
does not follow that the wayfarer herself called it 'the tanner's
dog.' Bennet fixed the date with precision. Four days later, hearing
of the trouble at Mrs. Wells's, Bennet said, 'I will be hanged if I
did not meet the young woman near this place and told her the way to
London.' Mr. Davy could only combat Bennet by laying stress on the
wayfarer's talking of 'the tanner's dog.' But the dog, at the moment
of the meeting, was probably well in view. Bennet knew him, and Bennet
was not asked, 'Did the woman call the dog "the tanner's dog," or do
you say this of your own knowledge?' Moreover, the tannery was well in
view, and the hound may have conspicuously started from that base of
operations. Mr. Davy's reply was a quibble.

His closing speech merely took up the old line: Elizabeth was absent
to conceal 'a misfortune'; her cunning mother was her accomplice.
There was no proof of Elizabeth's unchastity; nay, she had an
excellent character, 'but there is a time, gentlemen, when people
begin to be wicked.' If engaged for the other side Mr. Davy would have
placed his '_Nemo repente fuit turpissimus_'--no person of unblemished
character wades straight into 'innocent blood,' to use his own phrase.

The Recorder summed up against Elizabeth. He steadily assumed that
Nash was always right, and the neighbours always wrong, as to the
girl's original story. He said nothing of Bennet; the tanner's dog had
done for Bennet. He said that, if the Enfield witnesses were right,
the Dorset witnesses were wilfully perjured. He did not add that, if
the Dorset witnesses were right, the Enfield testifiers were perjured.

The jury brought in a verdict of 'Guilty of perjury, but not wilful
and corrupt.' This was an acquittal, but, the Recorder refusing the
verdict, they did what they were desired to do, and sentence was
passed. Two jurors made affidavit that they never intended a
conviction. The whole point had turned, in the minds of the jury, on
a discrepancy as to when Elizabeth finished the water in the broken
pitcher--on Wednesday, January 27, or on Friday, January 29. Both
accounts could not be true. Here, then, was 'perjury,' thought the
jury, but not 'wilful and corrupt,' not purposeful. But the jury had
learned that 'the court was impatient;' they had already brought
Elizabeth in guilty of perjury, by which they meant guilty of a casual
discrepancy not unnatural in a person hovering between life and death.
They thought that they could not go back on their 'Guilty,' and so
they went all the way to 'corrupt and wilful perjury'--murder by false
oath--and consistently added 'an earnest recommendation to mercy'!

By a majority of one out of seventeen judges, Elizabeth was banished
for seven years to New England. She was accused in the Press of being
an 'enthusiast,' but the Rev. William Reyner, who attended her in
prison, publicly proclaimed her a good Churchwoman and a good girl
(June 7, 1754). Elizabeth (June 24) stuck to her guns in a
manifesto--she had not once 'knowingly deviated from the truth.'

Mr. Davy had promised the jury that when Elizabeth was once condemned
all would come out--the whole secret. But though the most careful
attempts were made to discover her whereabouts from January 1 to
January 29, 1753, nothing was ever found out--a fact most easily
explained by the hypothesis that she was where she said she was, at
Mother Wells's.

As to Elizabeth's later fortunes, accounts differ, but she quite
certainly married, in Connecticut, a Mr. Treat, a respectable yeoman,
said to have been opulent. She died in Connecticut in June 1773,
leaving a family.

In my opinion Elizabeth Canning was a victim of the common sense of
the eighteenth century. She told a very strange tale, and common-sense
holds that what is strange cannot be true. Yet something strange had
undeniably occurred. It was very strange if Elizabeth on the night of
January 1, retired to become a mother, of which there was no
appearance, while of an amour even gossip could not furnish a hint. It
was very strange if, having thus retired, she was robbed, starved,
stripped and brought to death's door, bleeding and broken down. It was
very strange that no vestige of evidence as to her real place of
concealment could ever be discovered. It was amazingly strange that a
girl, previously and afterwards of golden character, should in a
moment aim by perjury at 'innocent blood.' But the eighteenth century,
as represented by Mr. Davy, Mr. Willes, the barrister who fabled in
court, and the Recorder, found none of these things one half so
strange as Elizabeth Canning's story. Mr. Henry Fielding, who had some
knowledge of human nature, was of the same opinion as the present
candid inquirer. 'In this case,' writes the author of _Tom Jones_,
'one of the most simple girls I ever saw, if she be a wicked one,
hath been too hard for me. I am firmly persuaded that Elizabeth
Canning is a poor, honest, simple, innocent girl.'

_Moi aussi_, but--I would not have condemned the gipsy!

       *       *       *       *       *

In this case the most perplexing thing of all is to be found in the
conflicting unpublished affidavits sworn in March 1753, when memories
as to the whereabouts of the gipsies were fresh. They form a great
mass of papers in State Papers Domestic, at the Record Office. I owe
to Mr. Courtney Kenny my knowledge of the two unpublished letters of
Fielding to the Duke of Newcastle which follow:

'My Lord Duke,--I received an order from my Lord Chancellor
immediately after the breaking up of the Council to lay before your
Grace all the Affidavits I had taken since the Gipsy Trial which
related to that Affair. I then told the Messenger that I had taken
none, as indeed the fact is the Affidavits of which I gave my Lord
Chancellor an Abstract having been all sworn before Justices of the
Peace in the Neighbourhood of Endfield, and remain I believe in the
Possession of an Attorney in the City.

'However in Consequence of the Commands with which your Grace was
pleased to honour me yesterday, I sent my Clerk immediately to the
Attorney to acquaint him with the Commands, which I doubt not he will
instantly obey. This I did from my great Duty to your Grace, for I
have long had no Concern in this Affair, nor have I seen any of the
Parties lately unless once when I was desired to send for the Girl
(Canning) to my House that a great number of Noblemen and Gentlemen
might see her and ask her what Questions they pleased. I am, with the
highest Duty,

'My Lord,

'Your Grace's most obedient
and most humble Servant,

'HENRY FIELDING.

'Ealing; April 14, 1753.
 'His Grace the Duke of Newcastle.'

'_Endorsed_: Ealing, April 14th, 1753
Mr. Fielding.
R. 16th.'

'My Lord Duke,--I am extremely concerned to see by a Letter which I
have just received from Mr. Jones by Command of your Grace that the
Persons concerned for the Prosecution have not yet attended your Grace
with the Affidavits in Canning's Affair. I do assure you upon my
Honour that I sent to them the moment I first received your Grace's
Commands, and having after three Messages prevailed with them to come
to me I desired them to fetch the Affidavits that I might send them to
your Grace, being not able to wait on you in Person. This they said
they could not do, but would go to Mr. Hume Campbell their Council,
and prevail with him to attend your Grace with all their Affidavits,
many of which I found were sworn after the Day mentioned in the Order
of Council. I told them I apprehended the latter could not be admitted
but insisted in the strongest Terms on their laying the others
immediately before your Grace, and they at last promised me they
would, nor have I ever seen them since.

'I have now again ordered my Clerk to go to them to inform them of the
last Commands I have received, but as I have no Compulsory Power over
them I cannot answer for their Behaviour, which _indeed I have long
disliked_, and have therefore long ago declined giving them any
advice, nor would I _unless in Obedience to your Grace have anything
to say to a set of the most obstinate fools I ever saw, and who seem
to me rather to act from a Spleen against my Lord Mayor, than from any
motive of Protecting Innocence, tho' that was certainly their motive
at first_.[3] In Truth, if I am not deceived, I suspect that they
desire that the Gipsey should be pardoned, and then to convince the
World that she was guilty in order to cast the greater Reflection on
him who was principally instrumental in obtaining such Pardon. I
conclude with assuring your Grace that I have acted in this Affair, as
I shall on all Occasions, with the most dutiful Regard to your
Commands, and that if my Life had been at Stake, as many know, I
could have done no more. I am, with the highest Respect,

'My Lord Duke,

'Yr. Grace's most obedient
and most humble Servant,

'HENRY FIELDING.

'Ealing; April 27, 1753.
'His Grace the Duke of Newcastle.'

_Endorsed_: 'Ealing: April 27th, 1753.
Mr. Fielding.'

[Footnote 3: My italics. Did Fielding abandon his belief in
Elizabeth?]




II

_THE MURDER OF ESCOVEDO_


'Many a man,' says De Quincey, 'can trace his ruin to a murder, of
which, perhaps, he thought little enough at the time.' This remark
applies with peculiar force to Philip II. of Spain, to his secretary,
Antonio Perez, to the steward of Perez, to his page, and to a number
of professional ruffians. All of these, from the King to his own
scullion, were concerned in the slaying of Juan de Escovedo, secretary
of Philip's famous natural brother, Don John of Austria. All of them,
in different degrees, had bitter reason to regret a deed which, at the
moment, seemed a commonplace political incident.

The puzzle in the case of Escovedo does not concern the manner of his
taking off, or the identity of his murderers. These things are
perfectly well known; the names of the guilty, from the King to the
bravo, are ascertained. The mystery clouds the motives for the deed.
_Why_ was Escovedo done to death? Did the King have him assassinated
for purely political reasons, really inadequate, but magnified by the
suspicious royal fancy? Or were the secretary of Philip II. and the
monarch of Spain rivals in the affections of a one-eyed widow of rank?
and did the secretary, Perez, induce Philip to give orders for
Escovedo's death, because Escovedo threatened to reveal to the King
their guilty intrigue? Sir William Stirling-Maxwell and Monsieur
Mignet accepted, with shades of difference, this explanation. Mr.
Froude, on the other hand, held that Philip acted for political
reasons, and with the full approval of his very ill-informed
conscience. There was no lady as a motive in the case, in Mr. Froude's
opinion. A third solution is possible: Philip, perhaps, wished to
murder Escovedo for political reasons, and without reference to the
tender passion; but Philip was slow and irresolute, while Perez, who
dreaded Escovedo's interference with his love affair, urged his royal
master on to the crime which he was shirking. We may never know the
exact truth, but at least we can study a state of morals and manners
at Madrid, compared with which the blundering tragedies of Holyrood,
in Queen Mary's time, seem mere child's play. The 'lambs' of Bothwell
are lambs playful and gentle when set beside the instruments of Philip
II.

The murdered man, Escovedo, and the 'first murderer,' as Shakespeare
says, Antonio Perez, had both been trained in the service of Ruy
Gomez, Philip's famous minister. Gomez had a wife, Aña de Mendoza,
who, being born in 1546, was aged thirty-two, not thirty-eight (as M.
Mignet says), in 1578, when Escovedo was killed. But 1546 may be a
misprint for 1540. She was blind in one eye in 1578, but probably both
her eyes were brilliant in 1567, when she really seems to have been
Philip's mistress, or was generally believed so to be. Eleven years
later, at the date of the murder, there is no obvious reason to
suppose that Philip was constant to her charms. Her husband, created
Prince d'Eboli, had died in 1573 (or as Mr. Froude says in 1567); the
Princess was now a widow, and really, if she chose to distinguish her
husband's old secretary, at this date the King's secretary, Antonio
Perez, there seems no reason to suppose that Philip would have
troubled himself about the matter. That he still loved Aña with a
constancy far from royal, that she loved Perez, that Perez and she
feared that Escovedo would denounce them to the King, is M. Mignet's
theory of the efficient cause of Escovedo's murder. Yet M. Mignet
holds, and rightly, that Philip had made up his mind, as far as he
ever did make up his mind, to kill Escovedo, long before that
diplomatist became an inconvenient spy on the supposed lovers.

To raise matters to the tragic height of the _Phædra_ of Euripides,
Perez was said to be the natural son of his late employer, Gomez, the
husband of his alleged mistress. Probably Perez was nothing of the
sort; he was the bastard of a man of his own name, and his alleged
mistress, the widow of Gomez, may even have circulated the other
story to prove that her relations with Perez, though intimate, were
innocent. They are a pretty set of people!

As for Escovedo, he and Perez had been friends from their youth
upwards. While Perez passed from the service of Gomez to that of
Philip, in 1572 Escovedo was appointed secretary to the nobly
adventurous Don John of Austria. The Court believed that he was
intended to play the part of spy on Don John, but he fell under the
charm of that gallant heart, and readily accepted, if he did not
inspire, the most daring projects of the victor of Lepanto, the Sword
of Christendom. This was very inconvenient for the leaden-footed
Philip, who never took time by the forelock, but always brooded over
schemes and let opportunity pass. Don John, on the other hand, was all
for forcing the game, and, when he was sent to temporise and
conciliate in the Low Countries, and withdraw the Spanish army of
occupation, his idea was to send the Spanish forces out of the
Netherlands by sea. When once they were on blue water he would make a
descent on England; rescue the captive Mary Stuart; marry her (he was
incapable of fear!); restore the Catholic religion, and wear the
English crown. A good plot, approved of by the Pope, but a plot which
did not suit the genius of Philip. He placed his leaden foot upon the
scheme and on various other gallant projects, conceived in the best
manner of Alexandre Dumas. Now Escovedo, to whom Don John was
devotedly attached, was the soul of all these chivalrous designs, and
for that reason Philip regarded him as a highly dangerous person.
Escovedo was at Madrid when Don John first went to the Low Countries
(1576). He kept urging Philip to accept Don John's fiery proposals,
though Antonio Perez entreated him to be cautious. At this date, 1576,
Perez was really the friend of Escovedo. But Escovedo would not be
advised; he wrote an impatient memorial to the King, denouncing his
stitchless policy (_descosido_), his dilatory, shambling, idealess
proceedings. So, at least, Sir William Stirling-Maxwell asserts in his
_Don John of Austria_: 'the word used by Escovedo was _descosido_,
"unstitched."' But Mr. Froude says that _Philip_ used the expression,
later, in reference to _another_ letter of Escovedo's which he also
called 'a bloody letter' (January 1578). Here Mr. Froude can hardly be
right, for Philip's letter containing that vulgar expression is of
July 1577.

In any case, in 1576 Philip was induced, by the intercession of Perez,
to overlook the fault, and Escovedo, whose presence Don John demanded,
was actually sent to him in December 1576. From this date both Don
John and Escovedo wrote familiarly to their friend Perez, while Perez
lured them on, and showed their letters to the King. Just as Charles
I. commissioned the Duke of Hamilton to spy on the Covenanted nobles,
and pretend to sympathise with them, and talk in their godly style,
so Philip gave Perez orders to entrap Don John and Escovedo. Perez
said: 'I want no theology but my own to justify me,' and Philip wrote
in reply, 'My theology takes the same view of the matter as your own.'

At this time, 1577, Perez, though a gambler and a profligate, who took
presents from all hands, must have meant nothing worse, on M. Mignet's
theory, than to serve Philip as he loved to be served, and keep him
well informed of Don John's designs. Escovedo was not yet, according
to M. Mignet, an obstacle to the amours of Perez and the King's
mistress, the Princess d'Eboli. Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, on the
other hand, holds that the object of Perez already was to ruin Don
John; for what reason Sir William owns that he cannot discover. Indeed
Perez had no such object, unless Don John confided to him projects
treasonous or dangerous to the Government of his own master, the King.

Now did Don John, or Escovedo, entrust Perez with designs not merely
chivalrous and impracticable, but actually traitorous? Certainly Don
John did nothing of the kind. Escovedo left him and went, without
being called for, to Spain, arriving in July 1577. During his absence
Don John defeated the Dutch Protestants in the battle of Gemblours, on
January 31, 1578. He then wrote a letter full of chivalrous loyalty to
Escovedo and Perez at Madrid. He would make Philip master indeed of
the Low Countries; he asked Escovedo and Perez to inspire the King
with resolution. To do that was impossible, but Philip could never
have desired to murder Escovedo merely because he asked help for Don
John. Yet, no sooner did Escovedo announce his return to Spain, in
July 1577, than Philip, in a letter to Perez, said, 'we must hasten to
despatch him before he kills us.' There seems to be no doubt that the
letter in which this phrase occurs is authentic, though we have it
only in a copy. But is the phrase correctly translated? The words
'_priesa á despacherle antes que nos mate_' certainly may be rendered,
'we must be quick and despatch _him_' (Escovedo) 'before he kills
_us_.' But Mr. Froude, much more lenient to Philip than to Mary
Stuart, proposes to render the phrase, 'we must despatch Escovedo
quickly' (_i.e._ send him about his business) 'before he worries us to
death.' Mr. Froude thus denies that, in 1577, Philip already meant to
kill Escovedo. It is unlucky for Mr. Froude's theory, and for Philip's
character, if the King used the phrase _twice_. In March 1578 he wrote
to Perez, about Escovedo, 'act quickly _antes que nos mate_,--before
he kills us.' So Perez averred, at least, but is his date correct?
This time Perez did act, and Escovedo was butchered! If Perez tells
truth, in 1577, Philip meant what he said, 'Despatch him before he
kills us.'

Why did Philip thus dread Escovedo? We have merely the published
statements of Perez, in his account of the affair. After giving the
general causes of Philip's distrust of Don John, and the ideas which
a deeply suspicious monarch may very well have entertained,
considering the adventurous character of his brother, Perez adds a
special charge against Escovedo. He vowed, says Perez, that, after
conquering England, he and Don John would attack Spain. Escovedo asked
for the captaincy of a castle on a rock commanding the harbour of
Santander; he was _alcalde_ of that town. He and Don John would use
this fortress, as Aramis and Fouquet, in the novel of Dumas, meant to
use Belle Isle, against their sovereign. As a matter of fact, Escovedo
had asked for the command of Mogro, the fortress commanding Santander,
in the spring of 1577, and Perez told Philip that the place should be
strengthened, for the protection of the harbour, but not entrusted to
Escovedo. Don John's loyalty could never have contemplated the use of
the place as a keep to be held in an attack on his King. But, if Perez
had, in 1577, no grudge against Escovedo as being perilous to his
alleged amour with the Princess d'Eboli, then the murderous plan of
Philip must have sprung from the intense suspiciousness of his own
nature, not from the promptings of Perez.

Escovedo reached Spain in July 1577. He was not killed till March 31,
1578, though attempts on his life were made some weeks earlier. M.
Mignet argues that, till the early spring of 1578, Philip held his
hand because Perez lulled his fears; that Escovedo then began to
threaten to disclose the love affair of Perez to his royal rival, and
that Perez, in his own private interest, now changed his tune, and, in
place of mollifying Philip, urged him to the crime. But Philip was so
dilatory that he could not even commit a murder with decent
promptitude. Escovedo was not dangerous, even to his mind, while he
was apart from Don John. But as weeks passed, Don John kept insisting,
by letter, on the return of Escovedo, and for _that_ reason, possibly,
Philip screwed his courage to the (literally) 'sticking' point, and
Escovedo was 'stuck.' Major Martin Hume, however, argues that, by this
time, circumstances had changed, and Philip had now no motive for
murder.

The impression of M. Mignet, and of Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, the
biographer of Don John, is quite different. They hold that the
Princess d'Eboli, in 1578, was Philip's mistress; that she deceived
him with Perez; that Escovedo threatened to tell all, and that Perez
therefore hurried on his murder. Had this been the state of affairs,
would Escovedo have constantly accepted the invitations of Perez to
dinner? The men would necessarily have been on the worst of terms, if
Escovedo was threatening Perez, but Escovedo, in fact, kept on dining
with Perez. Again, the policy of Perez would have been to send
Escovedo where he wanted to go, to Flanders, well out of the way, back
to Don John. It seems probable enough, though not certain, that, in
1567, the Princess and Philip were lovers. But it is, most unlikely,
and it is not proved, that Philip was still devoted to the lady in
1578. Some of the Princess's family, the Mendozas, now wanted to kill
Perez, as a dishonour to their blood. At the trial of Perez later,
much evidence was given to show that he loved the Princess, or was
suspected of doing so, but it is not shown that this was a matter
about which Philip had any reason to concern himself. Thus it is not
inconceivable that Escovedo disliked the relations between Perez and
the Princess, but nothing tends to show that he could have made
himself dangerous by revealing them to the King. Moreover, if he spoke
his mind to Perez on the matter, the two would not have remained, as
apparently they did, on terms of the most friendly intercourse. A
squire of Perez described a scene in which Escovedo threatened to
denounce the Princess, but how did the squire become a witness of the
scene, in which the Princess defied Escovedo in terms of singular
coarseness?

At all events, when Philip consulted the Marquis of Los Velez on the
propriety of killing Escovedo rather than sending him back to Don
John, the reasons, which convinced the Marquis, were mere political
suspicions.

It was at that time a question of conscience whether a king might have
a subject assassinated, if the royal motives, though sufficient, were
not such as could be revealed with safety in a court of justice. On
these principles Queen Mary had a right to take Darnley off, for
excellent political causes which could not safely be made public; for
international reasons. Mary, however, unlike Philip, did not consult
her confessor, who believed her to be innocent of her husband's death.
The confessor of Philip told him that the King had a perfect right to
despatch Escovedo, and Philip gave his orders to Perez. He repeated,
says Perez, in 1578, his words used in 1577: 'Make haste before he
kills us.'

As to this point of conscience, the right of a king to commit murder
on a subject for reasons of State, Protestant opinion seems to have
been lenient. When the Ruthvens were killed at Perth, on August 5,
1600, in an affair the most mysterious of all mysteries, the Rev.
Robert Bruce, a stern Presbyterian, refused to believe that James VI.
had not planned their slaughter. 'But your Majesty might have secret
reasons,' said Bruce to the King, who, naturally and truly, maintained
his own innocence. This looks as if Mr. Bruce, like the confessor of
Philip, held that a king had a right to murder a subject for secret
reasons of State. The Inquisition vigorously repudiated the doctrine,
when maintained by a Spanish preacher, but Knox approved of King
Henry's (Darnley's) murder of Riccio. My sympathies, on this point,
are with the Inquisition.

Perez, having been commissioned to organise the crime, handed on the
job to Martinez, his steward. Martinez asked a ruffianly page,
Enriquez, 'if I knew anybody in my country' (Murcia) 'who would stick
a knife into a person.' Enriquez said, 'I will speak about it to a
muleteer of my acquaintance, as, in fact, I did, and the muleteer
undertook the business.' But later, hearing that a man of importance
was to be knifed, Enriquez told Perez that a muleteer was not noble
enough: the job 'must be entrusted to persons of more consideration.'

Enriquez, in 1585, confessed for a good reason; Perez had absurdly
mismanaged the business. All sorts of people were employed, and, after
the murder, they fled, and began to die punctually in an alarming
manner. Naturally Enriquez thought that Perez was acting like the
Mures of Auchendrane, who despatched a series of witnesses and
accomplices in their murder of Kennedy. As they always needed a new
accomplice to kill the previous accomplice, then another to slay the
slayer, and so on, the Mures if unchecked would have depopulated
Scotland. Enriquez surmised that _his_ turn to die would soon come; so
he confessed, and was corroborated by Diego Martinez. Thus the facts
came out, and this ought to be a lesson to murderers.

As the muleteer hung fire, Perez determined to poison Escovedo. But he
did not in the least know how to set about it. Science was hardly in
her infancy. If you wanted to poison a man in Scotland, you had to
rely on a vulgar witch, or send a man to France, at great expense, to
buy the stuff, and the messenger was detected and tortured. The Court
of Spain was not more scientific.

Martinez sent Enriquez to Murcia, to gather certain poisonous herbs,
and these were distilled by a venal apothecary. The poison was then
tried on a barndoor fowl, which was not one penny the worse. But
Martinez somehow procured 'a certain water that was good to be given
as a drink.' Perez asked Escovedo to dinner, Enriquez waited at table,
and in each cup of wine that Escovedo drank, he, rather
homoeopathically, put 'a nutshellful of the water.' Escovedo was no
more poisoned than the cock of the earlier experiment. 'It was
ascertained that the beverage produced no effect whatever.'

A few days later, Escovedo again dined with the hospitable Perez. On
this occasion they gave him some white powder in a dish of cream, and
also gave him the poisoned water in his wine, thinking it a pity to
waste that beverage. This time Escovedo was unwell, and again, when
Enriquez induced a scullion in the royal kitchen to put more of the
powder in a basin of broth in Escovedo's own house. For this the poor
kitchenmaid who cooked the broth was hanged in the public square of
Madrid, _sin culpa_.

Pious Philip was demoralising his subjects at a terrible rate! But you
cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. Philip slew that girl of
his kitchen as surely as if he had taken a gun and shot her, but
probably the royal confessor said that all was as it should be.

In spite of the resources of Spanish science, Escovedo persisted in
living, and Perez determined that he must be shot or stabbed. Enriquez
went off to his own country to find a friend who was an assassin, and
to get 'a stiletto with a very fine blade, much better than a pistol
to kill a man with.' Enriquez, keeping a good thing in the family,
enlisted his brother: and Martinez, from Aragon, brought 'two proper
kind of men,' Juan de Nera and Insausti, who, with the King's
scullion, undertook the job. Perez went to Alcala for Holy Week, just
as the good Regent Murray left Edinburgh on the morning of Darnley's
murder, after sermon. 'Have a halibi' was the motto of both gentlemen.

The underlings dogged Escovedo in the evening of Easter Monday.
Enriquez did not come across him, but Insausti did his business with
one thrust, in a workmanlike way. The scullion hurried to Alcala, and
told the news to Perez, who 'was highly delighted.'

We leave this good and faithful servant, and turn to Don John. When
he, far away, heard the news he was under no delusions about love
affairs as the cause of the crime. He wrote to his wretched brother
the King 'in grief greater than I can describe.' The King, he said,
had lost the best of servants, 'a man without the aims and craft
which are now in vogue.' 'I may with just reason consider _myself_ to
have been the cause of his death,' the blow was really dealt at Don
John. He expressed the most touching anxiety for the wife and children
of Escovedo, who died poor, because (unlike Perez) 'he had clean
hands.' He besought Philip, by the love of our Lord, 'to use every
possible diligence to know whence the blow came and to punish it with
the rigour which it deserves.' He himself will pay the most pressing
debts of the dead. (From Beaumont, April 20, 1578.)

Probably the royal caitiff was astonished by this letter. On September
20 Don John wrote his last letter to his brother 'desiring more than
life some decision on your Majesty's part. Give me orders for the
conduct of affairs!' Philip scrawled in the margin, 'I will not
answer.' But Don John had ended his letter 'Our lives are at stake,
and all we ask is to lose them with honour.' These are like the last
words of the last letter of the great Montrose to Charles II., 'with
the more alacrity and vigour I go to search my death.' Like Montrose
Don John 'carried with him fidelity and honour to the grave.' He died,
after a cruel illness, on October 1. Brantôme says that he was
poisoned by order of the King, at the instigation of Perez. 'The side
of his breast was yellow and black, as if burned, and crumbled at the
touch.' These things were always said when a great personage died in
his bed. They are probably untrue, but a king who could
conscientiously murder his brother's friend could as conscientiously,
and for the same reasons, murder his brother.

The Princess d'Eboli rewarded and sheltered one of the murderers of
Escovedo. They were all gratified with chains of gold, silver cups,
abundance of golden _écus_, and commissions in the army; all were sent
out of the country, and some began to die strangely, which, as we saw,
frightened Enriquez into his confession (1585).

At once Perez was suspected. He paid a visit of condolence to young
Escovedo: he spoke of a love affair of Escovedo's in Flanders; an
injured husband must be the guilty man! But suspicion darkened. Perez
complained to the King that he was dogged, watched, cross-examined by
the _alcalde_ and his son. The Escovedo family had a friend in
Vasquez, another royal secretary. Knowing nothing of the King's guilt,
and jealous of Perez, he kept assuring the King that Perez was guilty:
that there was an amour, detected by Escovedo: that Escovedo perished
for a woman's sake: that Philip must investigate the case, and end the
scandal. The woman, of course, was the Princess d'Eboli. Philip cared
nothing for her, now at least. Mr. Froude says that Don Gaspar Moro,
in his work on the Princess, 'has disproved conclusively the imagined
_liaison_ between the Princess and Philip II.' On the other hand,
Philip was darkly concerned in litigations about property, _against_
the Princess; these affairs Vasquez conducted, while Perez naturally
was on the side of the widow of his benefactor. On these points, more
than a hundred letters of Vasquez exist. Meanwhile he left, and the
Escovedo family left, no stone unturned to prove that Perez murdered
Escovedo because Escovedo thwarted his amour with the Princess.

Philip had promised, again and again, to stand by Perez. But the
affair was coming to light, and if it must come out, it suited Philip
that Vasquez should track Perez on the wrong trail, the trail of the
amour, not follow the right scent which led straight to the throne,
and the wretch who sat on it. But neither course could be quite
pleasant to the King.

Perez offered to stand his trial, knowing that evidence against him
could not be found. His accomplices were far away; he would be
acquitted, as Bothwell was acquitted of Darnley's death. Philip could
not face the situation. He bade Perez consult the President of the
Council, De Pazos, a Bishop, and tell him all, while De Pazos should
mollify young Escovedo. The Bishop, a casuist, actually assured young
Escovedo that Perez and the Princess 'are as innocent as myself.' The
Bishop did not agree with the Inquisition: he could say that Perez was
innocent, because he only obeyed the King's murderous orders. Young
Escovedo retreated: Vasquez persevered, and the Princess d'Eboli,
writing to the King, called Vasquez 'a Moorish dog.' Philip had both
Perez and the Princess arrested, for Vasquez was not to be put down;
_his_ business in connection with the litigations was to pursue the
Princess, and Philip could not tell Vasquez that he was on the wrong
trail. The lady was sent to her estates; this satisfied Vasquez, and
Perez and he were bound over to keep the peace. But suspicion hung
about Perez, and Philip preferred that it should be so. The secretary
was accused of peculation, he had taken bribes on all hands, and he
was sentenced to heavy fines and imprisonment (January 1585). Now
Enriquez confessed, and a kind of secret inquiry, of which the records
survive, dragged its slow course along. Perez was under arrest, in a
house near a church. He dropped out of a window and rushed into the
church, the civil power burst open the gates, violated sanctuary, and
found our friend crouching, all draped with festoons of cobwebs, in
the timber work under the roof. The Church censured the magistrates,
but they had got Perez, and Philip defied the ecclesiastical courts.
Perez, a prisoner, tried to escape by the aid of one of Escovedo's
murderers, who was staunch, but failed, while his wife was ill treated
to make him give up all the compromising letters of the King. He did
give up two sealed trunks full of papers. But his ally and steward,
Martinez, had first (it is said) selected and secreted the royal notes
which proved the guilt of Philip.

Apparently the King thought himself safe now, and actually did not
take the trouble to see whether his compromising letters were in the
sealed trunks or not! At least, if he did know that they were absent,
and that Perez could produce proof of his guilt, it is hard to see
why, with endless doubts and hesitations, he allowed the secret
process for murder against Perez to drag on, after a long
interruption, into 1590. Vasquez examined and re-examined Perez, but
there was still only one witness against him, the scoundrel Enriquez.
One was not enough.

A new step was taken. The royal confessor assured Perez that he would
be safe if he told the whole truth and declared openly that he had
acted by the royal orders! Perez refused, Philip commanded again (Jan.
4, 1590). Perez must now reveal the King's motive for decreeing the
murder. If Philip was setting a trap for Perez that trap only caught
him if he could not produce the King's compromising letters, which, in
fact, he still possessed. Mr. Froude asserts that Philip had heard
from his confessor, and _he_ from the wife of Perez, that the letters
were still secreted and could be produced. If so, Perez would be safe,
and the King's character would be lost. What was Philip's aim and
motive? Would he declare the letters to be forgeries? No other mortal
(of that day) wrote such an unmistakable hand as his, it was the worst
in the world. He must have had some loophole, or he would never have
pressed Perez to bear witness to his own crime. A loophole he had, and
Perez knew it, for otherwise he would have obeyed orders, told the
whole story, and been set free. He did not. Mr. Froude supposes that
he did not think the royal authority would satisfy the judges. But
they could not condemn Perez, a mere accessory to Philip, without
condemning the King, and how could the judges do that? Perez, I think,
would have taken his chance of the judges' severity, as against their
King, rather than disobey the King's command to confess all, and so
have to face torture. He did face the torture, which proves, perhaps,
that he knew Philip could, somehow, escape from the damning evidence
of his own letters. Philip's loophole, Major Martin Hume thinks, was
this: if Perez revealed the King's reasons for ordering the murder,
they would appear as obsolete, at the date of the deed. Pedro alone
would be culpable. In any case he faced torture.

Like most people in his circumstances, he miscalculated his own power
of bearing agony. He had not the endurance of the younger Auchendrane
murderer: of Mitchell, the choice Covenanting assassin: of the gallant
Jacobite Nevile Payne, tortured nearly to death by the minions of the
Dutch usurper, William of Orange. All of these bore the torment and
kept their secrets. But 'eight turns of the rope' opened the mouth of
Perez, whose obstinacy had merely put him to great inconvenience. Yet
he did not produce Philip's letters in corroboration; he said that
they had been taken from him. However, next day, Diego Martinez, who
had hitherto denied all, saw that the game was up, and admitted the
truth of all that Enriquez had confessed in 1585.

About a month after the torture Perez escaped. His wife was allowed to
visit him in prison. She had been the best, the bravest, the most
devoted of women. If she had reason for jealousy of the Princess,
which is by no means certain, she had forgiven all. She had moved
heaven and earth to save her husband. In the Dominican church, at high
mass, she had thrown herself upon the King's confessor, demanding
before that awful Presence on the altar that the priest should refuse
to absolve the King unless he set Perez free.

Admitted to her husband's prison, she played the trick that saved Lord
Ogilvy from the dungeon of the Covenanters, that saved Argyle,
Nithsdale, and James Mòr Macgregor. Perez walked out of gaol in the
dress of his wife. We may suppose that the guards were bribed: there
is _always_ collusion in these cases. One of the murderers had horses
round the corner, and Perez, who cannot have been badly injured by the
rack, rode thirty leagues, and crossed the frontier of Aragon.

We have not to follow his later adventures. The refusal of the
Aragonese to give him up to Castile, their rescue of him from the
Inquisition, cost them their constitution, and about seventy of them
were burned as heretics. But Perez got clear away. He visited France,
where Henry IV. befriended him; he visited England, where Bacon was
his host. In 1594 (?) he published his _Relaciones_ and told the world
the story of Philip's conscience. That story must not be relied on, of
course, and the autograph letters of Philip as to the murder of
Escovedo are lost. But the copies of them at the Hague are regarded as
authentic, and the convincing passages are underlined in red ink.

Supposing it possible that Philip after all secured the whole of the
autograph correspondence, and that Perez only succeeded in preserving
the copies now at the Hague, we should understand why Perez would not
confess the King's crime: he had only copies of his proofs to show;
and copies were valueless as evidence. But it is certain that Perez
really had the letters.

'Bloody Perez,' as Bacon's mother called him, died at Paris in
November 1611, outliving the wretched master whom he had served so
faithfully. Queen Elizabeth tried to induce Amyas Paulet to murder
Mary Stuart. Paulet, as a man of honour, refused; he knew, too, that
Elizabeth would abandon him to the vengeance of the Scots. Perez ought
to have known that Philip would desert him: his folly was rewarded by
prison, torture, and confiscation, which were not more than the man
deserved, who betrayed and murdered the servant of Don John of
Austria.

     NOTE.--This essay was written when I was unaware that Major
     Martin Hume had treated the problem in _Transactions of the
     Royal Historical Society_, 1894, pp. 71-107, and in
     _Españoles é Ingleses_ (1903). The latter work doubtless
     represents Major Hume's final views. He has found among the
     Additional MSS. of the British Museum (28,269) a quantity of
     the contemporary letters of Perez, which supplement the
     copies, at the Hague, of other letters destroyed after the
     death of Perez. From these MSS. and other original sources
     unknown to Mr. Froude, and to Monsieur Mignet (see the
     second edition of his _Antonio Perez_; Paris, 1846), Major
     Hume's theory is that, for _political_ reasons, Philip gave
     orders that Escovedo should be assassinated. This was in
     late October or early November, 1577. The order was not then
     carried out; the reason of the delay I do not clearly
     understand. The months passed, and Escovedo's death ceased,
     in altered circumstances, to be politically desirable, but
     he became a serious nuisance to Perez and his mistress, the
     Princess d'Eboli. Philip had never countermanded the murder,
     but Perez, according to Major Hume, falsely alleges that the
     King was still bent on the murder, and that other statesmen
     were consulted and approved of it, _shortly before the
     actual deed_.[4] Perez gives this impression by a crafty
     manipulation of dates in his narrative. When he had Escovedo
     slain, he was fighting for his own hand; but Philip, who had
     never countermanded the murder, was indifferent, till, in
     1582, when he was with Alva in Portugal. The King now
     learned that Perez had behaved abominably, had poisoned his
     mind against his brother Don Juan, had communicated State
     secrets to the Princess d'Eboli, and had killed Escovedo,
     not in obedience to the royal order, but using that order as
     the shield of his private vengeance. Hence Philip's
     severities to Perez; hence his final command that Perez
     should disclose the royal motives for the destruction of
     Escovedo. They would be found to have become obsolete at the
     date when the crime was committed, and on Perez would fall
     the blame.

[Footnote 4: See p. 38, _supra_.]

     Such is Major Hume's theory, if I correctly apprehend it.
     The hypothesis leaves the moral character of Philip as black
     as ever: he ordered an assassination which he never even
     countermanded. His confessor might applaud him, but he knew
     that the doctors of the Inquisition, like the common
     sentiment of mankind, rejected the theory that kings had the
     right to condemn and execute, by the dagger, men who had
     been put to no public trial.




III

_THE CAMPDEN MYSTERY_


I

The ordinary historical mystery is at least so far clear that one or
other of two solutions must be right, if we only knew which. Perkin
Warbeck was the rightful King, or he was an impostor. Giacopo Stuardo
at Naples (1669) was the eldest son of Charles II., or he was a
humbug. The Man in the Iron Mask was _certainly_ either Mattioli or
Eustache Dauger. James VI. conspired against Gowrie, or Gowrie
conspired against James VI., and so on. There is reason and human
nature at the back of these puzzles. But at the back of the Campden
mystery there is not a glimmer of reason or of sane human nature,
except on one hypothesis, which I shall offer. The occurrences are, to
all appearance, motiveless as the events in a feverish dream. 'The
whole Matter is dark and mysterious; which we must therefore leave
unto Him who alone knoweth all Things, in His due Time, to reveal and
to bring to Light.'

So says the author of 'A True and Perfect Account of the Examination,
Confession, Trial, and Execution of _Joan Perry_, and her two Sons,
_John_ and _Richard Perry_, for the Supposed Murder of _Will
Harrison_, Gent., Being One of the most remarkable Occurrences which
hath happened in the Memory of Man. Sent in a Letter (by _Sir Thomas
Overbury_, of _Burton_, in the County of _Gloucester_, Knt., and one
of his Majesty's Justices of the Peace) to _Thomas Shirly_, Doctor of
Physick, in London. Also Mr. _Harrison's_ Own account,' &c. (London.
Printed for John Atkinson, near the Chapter House, in _St. Paul's
Church-Yard_. No date, but apparently of 1676.)

Such is the vast and breathless title of a pamphlet which, by
undeserved good luck, I have just purchased. The writer, Sir Thomas
Overbury, 'the nephew and heir,' says Mr. John Paget, 'of the unhappy
victim of the infamous Countess of Somerset' (who had the elder Overbury
poisoned in the Tower), was the Justice of the Peace who acted
as _Juge d'Instruction_ in the case of Harrison's disappearance.[5]

[Footnote 5: Paget, _Paradoxes and Puzzles_, p. 342. Blackwoods,
1874.]

To come to the story. In 1660, William Harrison, Gent., was steward or
'factor' to the Viscountess Campden, in Chipping Campden,
Gloucestershire, a single-streeted town among the Cotswold hills. The
lady did not live in Campden House, whose owner burned it in the Great
Rebellion, to spite the rebels; as Castle Tirrim was burned by its
Jacobite lord in the '15. Harrison inhabited a portion of the building
which had escaped destruction. He had been for fifty years a servant
of the Hickeses and Campdens, his age was seventy (which deepens the
mystery), he was married, and had offspring, including Edward, his
eldest son.

On a market day, in 1659, Mr. Harrison's house was broken into, at
high noon, while he and his whole family were 'at the Lecture,' in
church, a Puritan form of edification. A ladder had been placed
against the wall, the bars of a window on the second story had been
wrenched away with a ploughshare (which was left in the room), and
140_l._ of Lady Campden's money were stolen. The robber was never
discovered--a curious fact in a small and lonely village. The times,
however, were disturbed, and a wandering Cavalier or Roundhead soldier
may have 'cracked the crib.' Not many weeks later, Harrison's servant,
Perry, was heard crying for help in the garden. He showed a
'sheep-pick,' with a hacked handle, and declared that he had been set
upon by two men in white, with naked swords, and had defended himself
with his rustic tool. It is curious that Mr. John Paget, a writer of
great acuteness, and for many years police magistrate at Hammersmith,
says nothing of the robbery of 1659, and of Perry's crazy conduct in
the garden.[6] Perry's behaviour there, and his hysterical invention
of the two armed men in white, give the key to his character. The two
men in white were never traced of course, but, later, we meet three
men not less flagitious, and even more mysterious. They appear to have
been three 'men in buckram.'

[Footnote 6: See his _Paradoxes and Puzzles_, pp. 337-370, and, for
good reading, see the book _passim_.]

At all events, in quiet Campden, adventures obviously occurred to the
unadventurous. They culminated in the following year, on August 16,
1660. Harrison left his house in the morning (?) and walked the two
miles to Charringworth to collect his lady's rents. The autumn day
closed in, and between eight and nine o'clock old Mrs. Harrison sent
the servant, John Perry, to meet his master on the way home. Lights
were also left burning in Harrison's window. That night neither master
nor man returned, and it is odd that the younger Harrison, Edward, did
not seek for his father till very early next morning: he had the
convenience, for nocturnal search, of a moon which rose late. In the
morning, Edward went out and met Perry, returning alone: he had not
found his master. The pair walked to Ebrington, a village half way
between Campden and Charringworth, and learned that Harrison had
called, on the previous evening, as he moved home through Ebrington,
at the house of one Daniel. The hour is not given, but Harrison
certainly disappeared when just beyond Ebrington, within less than a
mile from Campden. Edward and Perry next heard that a poor woman had
picked up on the highway, beyond Ebrington, near some whins or furze,
a hat, band, and comb, which were Harrison's; they were found within
about half a mile of his own house. The band was bloody, the hat and
comb were hacked and cut. Please observe the precise words of Sir
Thomas Overbury, the justice who took the preliminary examinations:
'The Hat and Comb being hacked and cut, and the Band bloody, but
nothing more could there be found.' Therefore the hat and comb were
not on Harrison's head when they were hacked and cut: otherwise they
must have been blood-stained; the band worn about the throat was
bloody, but there was no trace of blood on the road. This passage
contains the key to the puzzle.

On hearing of the discovery of these objects all the people rushed to
hunt for Harrison's corpse, which they did not find.

An old man like Harrison was not likely to stay at Charringworth very
late, but it seems that whatever occurred on the highway happened
after twilight.

Suspicion fell on John Perry, who was haled before the narrator, Sir
Thomas Overbury, J.P. Perry said that after starting for Charringworth
to seek his master on the previous evening, about 8.45 P.M., he met by
the way William Reed of Campden, and explained to him that as he was
timid in the dark he would go back and take Edward Harrison's horse
and return. Perry did as he had said, and Reed left him 'at Mr.
Harrison's Court gate.' Perry dallied there till one Pierce came
past, and with Pierce (he did not say why) 'he went a bow's shot into
the fields,' and so back once more to Harrison's gate. He now lay for
an hour in a hen house, he rose at midnight, and again--the moon
having now risen and dispelled his fears--he started for
Charringworth. He lost his way in a mist, slept by the road-side,
proceeded in the dawn to Charringworth, and found that Harrison had
been there on the previous day. Then he came back and met Edward
Harrison on his way to seek his father at Charringworth.

Perry's story is like a tale told by an idiot, but Reed, Pierce, and
two men at Charringworth corroborated as far as their knowledge went.
Certainly Perry had been in company with Reed and Pierce, say between
nine and ten on the previous night. Now, if evil had befallen Harrison
it must have been before ten at night; he would not stay so late, if
sober, at Charringworth. Was he usually sober? The cool way in which
his wife and son took his absence suggests that he was a
late-wandering old boy. They may have expected Perry to find him in
his cups and tuck him up comfortably at Charringworth or at Ebrington.

Till August 24 Perry was detained in prison, or, odd to say, at the
inn! He told various tales; a tinker or a servant had murdered his
master and hidden him in a bean-rick, where, on search being made,
_non est inventus_. Harrison, and the rents he had collected, were
vanished in the azure. Perry now declared that he would tell all to
Overbury, and to no other man. To him Perry averred that his mother
and brother, Joan and Richard Perry, had murdered Harrison! It was his
brother who, by John Perry's advice and connivance, had robbed the
house in the previous year, while John 'had a Halibi,' being at
church. The brother, said John, buried the money in the garden. It was
sought for, but was not found. His story of the 'two men in white,'
who had previously attacked him in the garden, was a lie, he said. I
may add that it was not the lie of a sane man. Perry was conspicuously
crazy.

He went on with his fables. His mother and brother, he declared, had
often asked him to tell them when his master went to collect rents. He
had done so after Harrison started for Charringworth on the morning of
August 16. John Perry next gave an account of his expedition with his
brother in the evening of the fatal day, an account which was
incompatible with his previous tale of his doings and with the
authentic evidence of Reed and Pierce. Their honest version destroyed
Perry's new falsehood. He declared that Richard Perry and he had
dogged Harrison, as he came home at night, into Lady Campden's
grounds; Harrison had used a key to the private gate. Richard followed
him into the grounds; John Perry, after a brief stroll, joined him
there and found his mother (how did she come thither?) and Richard
standing over the prostrate Harrison, whom Richard incontinently
strangled. They seized Harrison's money and meant to put his body 'in
the great sink by Wallington's Mill.' John Perry left them, and knew
not whether the body was actually thrown into the sink. In fact, _non
est inventus_ in the sink, any more than in the bean-rick. John next
introduced his meeting with Pierce, but quite forgot that he had also
met Reed, and did not account for that part of his first story, which
Reed and Pierce had both corroborated. The hat, comb, and band John
said that he himself had carried away from Harrison's body, had cut
them with his knife, and thrown them into the highway. Whence the
blood on the band came he neglected to say.

On the strength of this impossible farrago of insane falsehoods, Joan
and Richard Perry were arrested and brought before Overbury. Not only
the 'sink' but the Campden fish-pools and the ruinous parts of the
house were vainly searched in quest of Harrison's body. On August 25
the three Perrys were examined by Overbury, and Richard and the mother
denied all that John laid to their charge. John persisted in his
story, and Richard admitted that he and John had spoken together on
the morning of the day when Harrison vanished, 'but nothing passed
between them to that purpose.'

As the three were being brought back from Overbury's house to Campden
an unfortunate thing happened. John was going foremost when Richard, a
good way behind, dropped 'a ball of inkle from his pocket.' One of his
guards picked it up, and Richard said that it 'was only his wife's
hair-lace.' At one end, however, was a slip-knot. The finder took it
to John, who, being a good way in front, had not seen his brother drop
it. On being shown the string John shook his head, and said that 'to
his sorrow he knew it, for that was the string his brother strangled
his master with.' To this circumstance John swore at the ensuing
trial.

The Assizes were held in September, and the Perrys were indicted both
for the robbery in 1659 and the murder in 1660. They pleaded 'Guilty'
to the first charge, as some one in court whispered to them to do, for
the crime was covered by the Act of Pardon and Oblivion passed by
Charles II. at his happy Restoration. If they were innocent of the
robbery, as probably they were, they acted foolishly in pleading
guilty. We hear of no evidence against them for the robbery, except
John's confession, which was evidence perhaps against John, but was
none against _them_. They thus damaged their case, for if they were
really guilty of the robbery from Harrison's house, they were the most
likely people in the neighbourhood to have robbed him again and
murdered him. Very probably they tied the rope round their own necks
by taking advantage of the good King's indemnity. They later withdrew
their confession, and probably were innocent of the theft in 1659.
[Transcriber's Note: original has 1559.]

On the charge of murder they were not tried in September. Sir
Christopher Turner would not proceed 'because the body of Harrison was
not found.' There was no _corpus delicti_, no evidence that Harrison
was really dead. Meanwhile John Perry, as if to demonstrate his
lunacy, declared that his mother and brother had tried to poison him
in prison! At the Spring Assizes in 1661, Sir B. Hyde, less legal than
Sir Christopher Turner, did try the Perrys on the charge of murder.
How he could do this does not appear, for the account of the trial is
not in the Record House, and I am unable at present to trace it. In
the _Arminian Magazine_, John Wesley publishes a story of a man who
was hanged for murdering another man, whom he afterwards met in one of
the Spanish colonies of South America. I shall not here interrupt the
tale of the Perrys by explaining how a hanged man met a murdered man,
but the anecdote proves that to inflict capital punishment for murder
without proof that murder has been committed is not only an illegal
but an injudicious proceeding. Probably it was assumed that Harrison,
if alive, would have given signs of life in the course of nine or ten
months.

At the trial in spring all three Perrys pleaded 'not guilty.' John's
confession being proved against him, 'he told them he was then mad and
knew not what he said.' There must have been _some_ evidence against
Richard. He declared that his brother had accused others besides him.
Being asked to prove this, he answered 'that most of those that had
given evidence against him knew it,' but named none. So evidence had
been given (perhaps to the effect that Richard had been flush of
money), but by whom, and to what effect, we do not know.

The Perrys were probably not of the best repute. The mother, Joan, was
supposed to be a witch. This charge was seldom brought against popular
well-living people. How intense was the fear of witches, at that date,
we know from the stories and accounts of trials in Glanvil's
_Sadducismus Triumphatus_. The neighbours probably held that Joan
Perry would, as a witch, be 'nane the waur o' a hanging.' She was put
to death first, under the belief that any hypnotic or other unholy
influence of hers, which prevented her sons from confessing, would be
destroyed by her death. We are not aware that post-hypnotic suggestion
is removed by the death of the suggester; the experiment has not been
tried. The experiment failed in Joan's case. Poor Richard, who was
hanged next, could not induce the 'dogged and surly' John to clear his
character by a dying declaration. Such declarations were then held
irrefragable evidence, at least in Scotland, except when (as in the
case of George Sprot, hanged for the Gowrie conspiracy) it did not
suit the Presbyterians to believe the dying man. When John was being
turned off, he said that 'he knew nothing of his master's death, nor
what was become of him, but they might hereafter (possibly) hear.' Did
John know something? It would not surprise me if he had an inkling of
the real state of the case.


II

They _did_ hear; but what they heard, and what I have now to tell, was
perfectly incredible. When 'some' years (two apparently) had passed,
Will Harrison, Gent., like the three silly ewes in the folk-rhyme,
'came hirpling hame.' Where had the old man been? He explained in a
letter to Sir Thomas Overbury, but his tale is as hard to believe as
that of John Perry.

He states that he left his house in the afternoon (not the morning) of
Thursday, August 16, 1660. He went to Charringworth to collect rents,
but Lady Campden's tenants were all out harvesting. August seems an
odd month for rent-collecting when one thinks of it. They came home
late, which delayed Harrison 'till the close of the evening.' He only
received 23 _l._, which John Perry said, at his first examination in
1660, had been paid by one Edward Plaisterer, and Plaisterer
corroborated. Harrison then walked homeward, in the dusk probably,
and, near Ebrington, where the road was narrow, and bordered by whins,
'there met me one horseman who said "_Art thou there?_"' Afraid of
being ridden over, Harrison struck the horse on the nose, and the
rider, with a sword, struck at him and stabbed him in the side. (It
was at this point of the road, where the whins grew, that the cut hat
and bloody band were found, but a thrust in the side would not make a
neck-band bloody.) Two other horsemen here came up, one of them
wounded Harrison in the thigh. They did not now take his 23_l._, but
placed him behind one of them on horseback, handcuffed him, and threw
a great cloak over him.

Now, is it likely that highwaymen would carry handcuffs which closed,
says Harrison, with a spring and a snap? The story is pure fiction,
and bad at that. Suppose that kidnapping, not robbery, was the motive
(which would account for the handcuffs), what had any mortal to gain
by kidnapping, for the purpose of selling him into slavery, a 'gent.'
of seventy years of age?

In the night they took Harrison's money and 'tumbled me down a
stone-pit.' In an hour they dragged him out again, and he naturally
asked what they wanted with him, as they had his money already. One of
these miscreants wounded Harrison again, and--stuffed his pockets full
of 'a great quantity of money.' If they had a great quantity of money,
what did they want with 23_l._? We hear of no other robberies in the
neighbourhood, of which misdeeds the money might have been the
profits. And why must Harrison carry the money? (It has been suggested
that, to win popular favour, they represented themselves as
smugglers, and Harrison, with the money, as their gallant purser,
wounded in some heroic adventure.)

They next rode till late on August 17, and then put Harrison down,
bleeding and 'sorely bruised with the carriage of the money,' at a
lonely house. Here they gave their victim broth and brandy. On
Saturday they rode all day to a house, where they slept, and on Sunday
they brought Harrison to Deal, and laid him down on the ground. This
was about three in the afternoon. Had they wanted to make for the sea,
they would naturally have gone to the _west_ coast. While one fellow
watched Harrison, two met a man, and 'I heard them mention seven
pounds.' The man to whom seven pounds were mentioned (Wrenshaw was his
name, as Harrison afterwards heard--where?) said that he thought
Harrison would die before he could be put on board a ship. _Que diable
allait-il faire dans cette galère?_ Harrison was, however, put on
board a casual vessel, and remained in the ship for six weeks.

    Where was the land to which the ship would go?
    Far, far ahead is all the sailors know!

Harrison does not say into what 'foam of perilous seas, in faery lands
forlorn' the ship went wandering for six mortal weeks. Like Lord
Bateman:

    He sailéd East, and he sailéd West,
    Until he came to famed Turkee,
    Where he was taken and put in prison,
    Till of his life he was wear--ee!

'Then the Master of the ship came and told me, and _the rest who were
in the same condition_, that he discovered three Turkish ships.' 'The
rest who were in the same condition'! We are to understand that a
whole cargo of Harrisons was kidnapped and consigned captive to a
vessel launched on ocean, on the off chance that the captain might
meet three Turkish rovers who would snap them up. At this rate of
carrying on, there must have been disappearances as strange as
Harrison's, from dozens of English parishes, in August 1660. Had a
crew of kidnappers been taking captives for purposes of private fiscal
policy, they would have shipped them to the Virginian plantations,
where Turkish galleys did not venture, and they would not have
kidnapped men of seventy. Moreover, kidnappers would not damage their
captives by stabbing them in the side and thigh, when no resistance
was made, as was done to Harrison.

'The rest who were in the same condition' were 'dumped down' near
Smyrna, where the valuable Harrison was sold to 'a grave physician.'
'This Turk he' was eighty-seven years of age, and 'preferred Crowland
in Lincolnshire before all other places in England.' No inquiries are
known to have been made about a Turkish medical man who once practised
at Crowland in Lincolnshire, though, if he ever did, he was likely to
be remembered in the district. This Turk he employed Harrison in the
still room, and as a hand in the cotton fields, where he once knocked
his slave down with his fist--pretty well for a Turk of eighty-seven!
He also gave Harrison (whom he usually employed in the chemical
department of his business) 'a silver bowl, double gilt, to drink in,
and named him Boll'--his way of pronouncing bowl--no doubt he had
acquired a Lincolnshire accent.

This Turk fell ill on a Thursday, and died on Saturday, when Harrison
tramped to the nearest port, bowl and all. Two men in a Hamburg ship
refused to give him a passage, but a third, for the price of his
silver-gilt bowl, let him come aboard. Harrison was landed, without
even his bowl, at Lisbon, where he instantly met a man from Wisbech,
in Lincolnshire. This good Samaritan gave Harrison wine, strong
waters, eight stivers, and his passage to Dover, whence he came back
to Campden, much to the amazement of mankind. We do not hear the names
of the ship and skipper that brought Harrison from Lisbon to Dover.
Wrenshaw (the man to whom seven pounds 'were mentioned') is the only
person named in this delirious tissue of nonsense.

The editor of our pamphlet says, 'Many question the truth of this
account Mr. Harrison gives of himself, and his transportation,
believing he was never out of England.' I do not wonder at their
scepticism. Harrison had 'all his days been a man of sober life and
conversation,' we are told, and the odd thing is that he 'left behind
him a considerable sum of his Lady's money in his house.' He did not
see any of the Perrys on the night of his disappearance. The editor
admits that Harrison, as an article of merchandise, was not worth his
freight to Deal, still less to Smyrna. His son, in his absence, became
Lady Campden's steward, and behaved but ill in that situation. Some
suspected that this son arranged the kidnapping of Harrison, but, if
so, why did he secure the hanging of John Perry, in chains, on
Broadway hill, 'where he might daily see him'?

That might be a blind. But young Harrison could not expect John Perry
to assist him by accusing himself and his brother and mother, which
was the most unlooked-for event in the world. Nor could he know that
his father would come home from Charringworth on August 16, 1660, in
the dark, and so arrange for three horsemen, in possession of a heavy
weight of specie, to stab and carry off the aged sire. Young Harrison
had not a great fardel of money to give them, and if they were already
so rich, what had they to gain by taking Harrison to Deal, and putting
him, with 'others in the same condition,' on board a casual ship? They
could have left him in the 'stone-pit:' he knew not who they were, and
the longer they rode by daylight, with a hatless, handcuffed, and
sorely wounded prisoner, his pockets overburdened with gold, the more
risk of detection they ran. A company of three men ride, in broad
daylight, through England from Gloucestershire to Deal. Behind one of
them sits a wounded, _and hatless_, and handcuffed captive, his
pockets bulging with money. Nobody suspects anything, no one calls the
attention of a magistrate to this extraordinary _démarche_! It is too
absurd!

The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false. At
every baiting place, at every inn, these weird riders must have been
challenged. If Harrison told truth, he must have named the ship and
skipper that brought him to Dover.

Dismissing Harrison's myth, we ask, what could account for his
disappearance? He certainly walked, on the evening of August 16, to
within about half a mile of his house. He would not have done that had
he been bent on a senile amour involving his absence from home, and
had that scheme of pleasure been in his mind, he would have provided
himself with money. Again, a fit of 'ambulatory somnambulism,' and the
emergence of a split or secondary personality with forgetfulness of
his real name and address, is not likely to have seized on him at that
very moment and place. If it did, as there were no railways, he could
not rush off in a crowd and pass unnoticed through the country.

Once more, the theory of ambulatory somnambulism does not account for
his hacked hat and bloody band found near the whins on the road beyond
Ebrington. Nor does his own story account for them. He was stabbed in
the side and thigh, he says. This would not cut his hat or ensanguine
his band. On the other hand, he would leave pools and tracks of blood
on the road--'the high way.' 'But nothing more could there be found,'
no pools or traces of blood on the road. It follows that the hacked
hat and bloody band were a designed false trail, _not_ left there by
John Perry, as he falsely swore, but by some other persons.

The inference is that for some reason Harrison's presence at Campden
was inconvenient to somebody. He had lived through most troubled
times, and had come into a changed state of affairs with new masters.
He knew some secret of the troubled times: he was a witness better out
of the way. He may conceivably have held a secret that bore on the
case of one of the Regicides; or that affected private interests, for
he was the trusted servant of a great family. He was therefore
spirited away: a trail certainly false--the cut hat and bloody
band--was laid. By an amazing coincidence his servant, John Perry,
went more or less mad--he was not sane on the evening of Thursday,
August 16, and accused himself, his brother, and mother. Harrison was
probably never very far from Campden during the two or three years of
his disappearance. It was obviously made worth his while to tell his
absurd story on his return, and to accept the situation. No other
hypothesis 'colligates the facts.' What Harrison knew, why his absence
was essential, we cannot hope to discover. But he never was a captive
in 'famed Turkee.' Mr. Paget writes: 'It is impossible to assign a
sufficient motive for kidnapping the old man ... much profit was not
likely to arise from the sale of the old man as a slave.' Obviously
there was no profit, especially as the old man was delivered in a
wounded and imperfect condition. But a motive for keeping Harrison out
of the way is only hard to seek because we do not know the private
history of his neighbours. Roundheads among them may have had
excellent reasons, under the Restoration, for sequestering Harrison
till the revenges of the Restoration were accomplished. On this view
the mystery almost ceases to be mysterious, for such mad
self-accusations as that of John Perry are not uncommon.[7]

[Footnote 7: Not only have I failed to trace the records of the Assize
at which the Perrys were tried, but the newspapers of 1660 seem to
contain no account of the trial (as they do in the case of the Drummer
of Tedworth, 1663), and Miss E.M. Thompson, who kindly undertook the
search, has not even found a ballad or broadside on 'The Campden
Wonder' in the British Museum. The pamphlet of 1676 has frequently
been republished, in whole or in part, as in _State Trials_, vol.
xiv., in appendix to the case of Captain Green; which see, _infra_, p.
193, _et seq._]




IV

_THE CASE OF ALLAN BRECK_


Who killed the Red Fox? What was the secret that the Celts would not
communicate to Mr. R.L. Stevenson, when he was writing _Kidnapped_?
Like William of Deloraine, 'I know but may not tell'; at least, I know
all that the Celt knows. The great-grandfather and grandfather of a
friend of mine were with James Stewart of the Glens, the victim of
Hanoverian injustice, in a potato field, near the road from
Ballachulish Ferry to Appin, when they heard a horse galloping at a
break-neck pace. 'Whoever the rider is,' said poor James, 'he is not
riding his own horse.' The galloper shouted, 'Glenure has been shot!'

'Well,' said James to his companion, 'whoever did it, I am the man
that will hang for it.'

Hanged he was. The pit in which his gibbet stood is on the crest of a
circular 'knowe,' or hummock, on the east side of the Ballachulish
Hotel, overlooking the ferry across the narrows, where the tide runs
like a great swift river.

I have had the secret from two sources; the secret which I may not
tell. One informant received it from his brother, who, when he came
to man's estate, was taken apart by his uncle. 'You are old enough to
know now,' said that kinsman, 'and I tell you that it may not be
forgotten.' The gist of the secret is merely what one might gather
from the report of the trial, that though Allan Breck was concerned in
the murder of Campbell of Glenure, he was not alone in it.

The truth is, according to tradition, that as Glenure rode on the
fatal day from Fort William to his home in Appin, the way was lined
with marksmen of the Camerons of Lochaber, lurking with their guns
among the brushwood and behind the rocks. But their hearts failed
them, no trigger was drawn, and when Glenure landed on the Appin side
of the Ballachulish Ferry, he said, 'I am safe now that I am out of my
mother's country,' his mother having been of clan Cameron. But he had
to reckon with the man with the gun, who was lurking in the wood of
Letter More ('the great hanging coppice'), about three-quarters of a
mile on the Appin side of Ballachulish Ferry. The gun was not one of
the two dilapidated pieces shown at the trial of James of the Glens,
nor, I am told, was it the Fasnacloich gun. The real homicidal gun was
found some years ago in a hollow tree. People remember these things
well in Appin and Glencoe, though the affair is a hundred and fifty
years old, and though there are daily steamers bringing the
newspapers. There is even a railway, not remarkable for speed, while
tourists, English, French, and American, are for ever passing to view
Glencoe, and to write their names in the hotel book after luncheon,
then flying to other scenes. There has even been a strike of long
duration at the Ballachulish Quarries, and Labour leaders have
perorated to the Celts; but Gaelic is still spoken, second sight is
nearly as common as short sight, you may really hear the fairy music
if you bend your ear, on a still day, to the grass of the fairy knowe.
Only two generations back a fairy boy lived in a now ruinous house,
noted in the story of the Massacre of Glencoe, beside the brawling
river: and a woman, stolen by the fairies, returned for an hour to her
husband, who became very unpopular, as he neglected the means for her
rescue; I think he failed to throw a dirk over her shoulder. Every now
and then mysterious lights may be seen, even by the Sassenach,
speeding down the road to Callart on the opposite side of the narrow
sea-loch, ascending the hill, and running down into the salt water.
The causes of these lights, and of the lights on the burial isle of
St. Mun, in the middle of the sea strait, remain a mystery. Thus the
country is still a country of prehistoric beliefs and of fairly
accurate traditions. For example, at the trial of James Stewart for
the murder of Glenure, one MacColl gave damaging evidence, the
MacColls being a sept subordinate to the MacIans or Macdonalds of
Glencoe, who, by the way, had no hand in the murder. Till recently
these MacColls were still disliked for the part played by the
witness, and were named 'King George's MacColls.'

[Illustration: map]

But we must come to the case of Allan Breck. To understand it, some
knowledge of topography is necessary. Leaving Oban by steamer, you
keep on the inside of the long narrow island of Lismore, and reach the
narrow sea inlet of Loch Creran on your right. The steamer does not
enter it, but, taking a launch or a boat, you go down Loch Creran. On
your left is the peninsula of Appin; its famous green hills occupy the
space bounded by Loch Creran on the south and Glencoe on the north.
Landing near the head of Loch Creran, a walk of two miles takes you to
the old house of Fasnacloich, where Allan Breck was wont to stay. Till
two or three years ago it belonged to the Stewarts of Fasnacloich,
cadets of the chief, the Laird of Appin; all Appin was a Stewart
country and loyal to the King over the Water, their kinsman. About a
mile from Fasnacloich, further inland, is the rather gloomy house of
Glenure, the property of Campbell of Glenure, the Red Fox who was shot
on the road under Letter More. Walking across the peninsula to Appin
House, you pass Acharn in Duror, the farm of James Stewart of the
Glens, himself an illegitimate kinsman of the Laird of Appin. To the
best of my memory the cottage is still standing, and has a new roof of
corrugated iron. It is an ordinary Highland cottage, and Allan, when
he stayed with James, his kinsman and guardian, slept in the barn.
Appin House is a large plain country house, close to the sea. Further
north-east, the house of Ardshiel, standing high above the sea, is
visible from the steamer going to Fort William. At Ardshiel, Rob Roy
fought a sword and target duel with the laird, and Ardshiel led the
Stewarts in the rising of 1745; Appin, the chief, held aloof. The next
place of importance is Ballachulish House, also an old house of
Stewart of Ballachulish. It is on the right hand of the road from
Ballachulish Pier to Glencoe, beneath a steep wooded hill, down which
runs the burn where Allan Breck was fishing on the morning of the day
of Glenure's murder, done at a point on the road three-quarters of a
mile to the south-west of Ballachulish House, where Allan had slept on
the previous night. From the house the road passes on the south side
of the salt Loch Leven (not Queen Mary's Loch Leven). Here is
Ballachulish Ferry, crossing to Lochaber. Following the road you come
opposite the House of Carnoch, then possessed by Macdonalds (the house
has been pulled down; there is a good recent ghost story about that
business), and the road now enters Glencoe. On high hills, well to the
left of the road and above Loch Leven, are Corrynakeigh and
Coalisnacoan (the Ferry of the Dogs), overtopping the narrows of Loch
Leven. Just opposite the House of Carnoch, on the Cameron side of Loch
Leven, is the House of Callart (Mrs. Cameron Lucy's). Here and at
Carnoch, as at Fasnacloich, Acharn, and Ballachulish, Allan Breck was
much at home among his cousins.

From Loch Leven north to Fort William, with its English garrison, all
is a Cameron country. Campbell of Glenure was an outpost of Whiggery
and Campbells, in a land of loyal Stewarts, Camerons, and Macdonalds
or MacIans of Glencoe. Of the Camerons, the gentle Lochiel had died in
France; his son, a boy, was abroad; the interests of the clan were
represented by Cameron of Fassifern, Lochiel's uncle, living a few
miles west by north of Fort William. Fassifern, a well-educated man
and a burgess of Glasgow, had not been out with Prince Charles, but
(for reasons into which I would rather not enter) was not well trusted
by Government. Ardshiel, also, was in exile, and his tenants, under
James Stewart of the Glens, loyally paid rent to him, as well as to
the commissioners of his forfeited estates. The country was seething
with feuds among the Camerons themselves, due to the plundering by
----, of ----, of the treasure left by Prince Charles in the hands of
Cluny. The state of affairs was such that the English commander in
Fort William declared that, if known, it 'would shock even Lochaber
consciences.' 'A great ox hath trodden on my tongue' as to _this_
business. Despite the robbery of Prince Charles's gold, deep poverty
prevailed.

In February, 1749, Campbell of Glenure had been appointed Factor for
Government over the forfeited estates of Ardshiel (previously managed
by James Stewart of the Glens), of Lochiel, and of Callart. In the
summer of 1751, Glenure evicted James from a farm, and in April, 1752,
took measures for evicting other farmers on Ardshiel estates. Such
measures were almost unheard of in the country, and had, years
before, caused some agrarian outrages among Gordons and Camerons;
these were appeased by the King over the Water, James VIII. and III.
James Stewart, in April, 1752, went to Edinburgh, and obtained a legal
sist, or suspension of the evictions, against Glenure, which was
withdrawn on Glenure's application, who came home from Edinburgh, and
intended to turn the tenants out on May 15, 1752. They were assailed
merely as of Jacobite name and tendencies. Meanwhile Allan Breck--who
had deserted the Hanoverian army after Prestonpans, had joined Prince
Charles, fought at Culloden, escaped to France, and entered the French
army--was lodging about Appin among his cousins, perhaps doing a
little recruiting for King Louis. He was a tall thin man, marked with
smallpox.

Cruising about the country also was another Jacobite soldier, 'the
Sergent More,' a Cameron, later betrayed by ----, of ----, who robbed
the Prince's hoard of gold. But the Sergeant More had nothing to do,
as has been fancied, with the murder of Glenure. The state of the
country was ticklish; Prince Charles expected to invade with Swedish
forces, under the famous Marshal Keith, by the connivance of Frederick
the Great, and he had sent Lochgarry, with Dr. Archibald Cameron and
others, to feel the pulse of the western clans. As Government knew all
about these intrigues from Pickle the Spy, they were evicting Jacobite
tenants from Ardshiel's lands, and meant to do the same, by agency of
Campbell of Glenure, in Lochaber, Lochiel's country.

On Monday, May 11, Campbell, who intended to do the evictions on May
15, left Glenure for Fort William, on business; the distance is
computed at sixteen miles, by the old hill road. Allan Breck, on the
11th, was staying at Fasnacloich, near Glenure, where the fishing is
very good. When Glenure moved north to Fort William, Allan went to
James Stewart's cottage of Acharn. Glenure's move was talked of, and
that evening Allan changed his own blue coat, scarlet vest, and black
velvet breeches for a dark short coat with silver buttons, a blue
bonnet, and trousers (the Highlanders had been diskilted), all
belonging to James Stewart. He usually did make these changes when
residing with friends. In these clothes next day (Tuesday, May 12)
Allan, with young Fasnacloich, walked to Carnoch, the house of
Macdonald of Glencoe, situated just where the Water of Coe or Cona
enters Loch Leven. The dowager of the house was natural sister of
James of the Glens, and full sister of the exiled Stewart of Ardshiel.
From Carnoch, Allan, on the same day, crossed the sea-strait to
Callart opposite, where Mrs. Cameron was another half-sister to James
of the Glens. On Wednesday Allan recrossed, called at Carnoch, and
went to stay at Ballachulish House. On Thursday, when Glenure would
certainly return home by Ballachulish Ferry, Allan, about mid-day, was
seen to go fishing up Ballachulish burn, where he caught no trout,
and I do not wonder at it.

The theory of the prosecution was that, from the high ground to the
left of the burn he watched the ferry, having one or two guns, though
how he got them unobserved to the place is the difficulty; he could
not have walked the roads from Acharn unobserved with a gun, for the
Highlanders had been disarmed. At this point he must have had the
assistance and the gun of _the other man_. Allan came down from the
hill, asked the ferryman if Glenure had crossed, and returned to his
point of observation. About five o'clock in the afternoon, Glenure,
with a nephew of his, Mungo Campbell, a 'writer' or solicitor, crossed
the ferry, and was greeted and accompanied for three-quarters of a
mile on his homeward way by old Stewart of Ballachulish, who turned
back and went to his house. A sheriff's officer walked ahead of
Glenure, who, like Mungo, was mounted. Behind both, mounted, was
Campbell's servant, John Mackenzie. The old road was (and is) a rough
track, through thick coppice. There came a shot, and Glenure, pierced
by two balls, fell and died.

John Mackenzie, Glenure's servant, now rode onwards at a great gallop
to find Campbell of Ballieveolan, and on his way came to Acharn and
met James Stewart, with the two ancestors of my friend, as already
described. He gave the news to James, who 'wrung his hands and
expressed great concern at what had happened, as what might bring
innocent people to trouble.' In fact, he had once, or oftener, when
drinking, expressed a desire to have a shot at Glenure, and so had
Allan. But James was a worthy, sensible man when sober, and must have
known that, while he could not frighten the commissioners of forfeited
estates by shooting their agent, he was certain to be suspected if
their agent was shot. As a matter of fact, as we shall see, he had
taken active steps to secure the presence of a Fort William solicitor
at the evictions on Friday, May 15, to put in a legal protest. But he
thought it unadvisable to walk three or four miles and look after
Glenure's corpse; the Highlanders, to this day, have a strong dread or
dislike of corpses. That night James bade his people hide his arms,
four swords, a long Spanish gun, and a shorter gun, neither of which
weapons, in fact, did the trick, nor could be depended on not to miss
fire.

Where, meanwhile, was Allan? In the dusk, above Ballachulish House, he
was seen by Kate MacInnes, a maid of the house; they talked of the
murder, and she told Donald Stewart, a very young man, son-in-law of
Ballachulish, where Allan was out on the hillside. Donald Stewart
averred that, on hearing from Kate that Allan wanted to see him (Kate
denied that she said this), he went to the hill, accused Allan of the
crime, and was told, in reply, that Allan was innocent, though, as a
deserter from the Hanoverian army, and likely to be suspected, he must
flee the country. Other talk passed, to which we shall return. At
three in the morning of Friday, May 15, Allan knocked at the window
of Carnoch House (Glencoe's), passed the news, was asked no questions,
refused a drink and made for the sheiling, or summer hut, high on the
hill side of Coalisnacoan, whence you look down on the narrows of Loch
Leven.

There we leave Allan for the moment, merely remarking that he had no
money, no means of making his escape. As he is supposed by the
prosecution to have planned the slaying of Glenure with James Stewart
on May 11, it seems plain that James would then have given him money
to use in his escape, or, if he had no money by him, would have sent
at once to Fort William or elsewhere to raise it. He did not do this,
and neither at Carnoch, Callart, nor Ballachulish House did Allan
receive any money.

But, on May 12, when Allan went to Carnoch and Callart, James sent a
servant to a very old Mr. Stewart, father of Charles Stewart, notary
public. The father was a notary also, and James, who wanted a man of
law to be at the evictions on May 15, and thought that Charles Stewart
was absent in Moidart, conceived that the old gentleman would serve
the turn. But his messenger missed the venerable sportsman, who had
gone a-fishing. Learning later that Charles had returned from Moidart,
James, at 8 A.M. on May 14 (the day of the murder), sent a servant to
Charles at Fort William, bidding him come to the evictions on May 15,
'as everything must go wrong without a person that can act, and that
I can trust.' In a postscript he added, 'As I have no time to write to
William (Stewart), let him send down immediately 8_l._ to pay for four
milk cows I bought for his wife at Ardshiel.' His messenger had also
orders to ask William Stewart for the money.

Nothing could seem more harmless, but the prosecution might have
argued that this letter was, as to the coming of the notary, a
'blind,' and that the real object was, under the plea of sending for
the notary, to send the messenger for William Stewart's 8_l._,
destined to aid Allan in his escape.[8] There was no proof or even
suggestion that, on May 12, James had asked old Mr. Stewart to send
money for Allan's use, or had asked William Stewart, as having none by
him he would have done--that is, if James had concerted the murder
with Allan. If, on May 14, James was trying to raise money to help a
man who, as he knew, would need it after committing a murder on that
day, he showed strange want of foresight. He might not get the money,
or might not be able to send it to Allan. In fact, that day James did
not get the money. The prosecution argued that the money was sent for
on May 14, to help Allan Breck, and did not even try to show that
James had sent for money on May 12; when it would have arrived in good
time. Indeed James did not, on May 12, send any message to William
Stewart at Fort William, from whom, not from Charles or the old
gentleman, he tried to raise the cash on May 14. A friendly or a just
jury would have noted that if James planned a murder on the night of
May 11, and had no money, his very first move, on May 12, would be to
try to raise money for the assassin's escape. No mortal would put off
that step till the morning of the crime; indeed, it is amazing that
Allan, if he meant to do the deed, did not first try to obtain cash
for his escape. The relations of Glenure suspected, at the time, that
Allan was not the assassin, that he fled merely to draw suspicion away
from the real criminal (as he does in _Kidnapped_), and they even
wished to advertise a pardon for him, if he would come in and give
evidence. These facts occur in a copious unpublished correspondence of
the day between Glenure's brothers and kinsmen; Mr. Stevenson had
never heard of these letters.[9] Thus, up to the day of the murder,
Allan may not have contemplated it; he may have been induced,
unprepared, to act as accessory to _the other man_.

[Footnote 8: Really, the prosecution did not make this point: an
oversight.]

[Footnote 9: They are in the possession of Mr. Walter Blaikie, who
kindly lent them to me.]

The point where, according to the prosecution, the evidence 'pinched'
James of the Glens was his attempt to raise money on May 14. What
could he want with so large a sum as 8_l._, so suddenly, as he had no
bill to meet? Well, as a number of his friends were to be thrown out
of their farms, with their cattle, next day, James might need money
for their relief, and it seems certain that he had made no effort to
raise money at the moment when he inevitably must have done so, if
guilty, that is, on May 12, immediately after concerting, as was
alleged, the plot with Allan Breck. Failing to get money from William
Stewart at Fort William on May 14, James did on May 15 procure a small
sum from him or his wife, and did send what he could scrape together
to Allan Breck at Coalisnacoan. This did not necessarily imply guilt
on James's part. Allan, whether guilty or not, was in danger as a
suspected man and a deserter; James was his father's friend, had been
his guardian, and so, in honour, was bound to help him.

But how did he know where Allan was to be found? If both were guilty
they would have arranged, on May 11, a place where Allan might lurk.
If they did arrange that, both were guilty. But Donald Stewart, who
went, as we have said, and saw Allan on the hillside on the night of
the murder, added to his evidence that Allan had then told him to tell
James of the Glens where he might be found, that is, at Coalisnacoan.
These tidings Donald gave to James on the morning of May 15. James
then sent a pedlar, Allan's cousin, back to William Stewart, got
3_l._, added, in the evening of the 16th, more money of his own, and
sent it to Allan. There was a slight discrepancy between the story of
the maid, Kate MacInnes, and that of Donald Stewart, as to what
exactly passed between them, concerning Allan, on the night of the
murder, and whether Allan did or did not give her a definite message
to Donald. The prosecution insisted on this discrepancy, which really,
as James's advocate told the jury, rather went to prove their want of
collusion in the manufacture of testimony. Had their memories been
absolutely coincident, we might suspect collusion--that they had been
'coached' in their parts. But a discrepancy of absolutely no
importance rather suggests independent and honest testimony. If this
be so, Allan and James had arranged no trysting-place on May 11, as
they must have done if Allan was to murder Glenure, and James was to
send him money for his escape.

But there was a discrepancy of evidence as to the hour when the pedlar
sent by James to Fort William on May 15 arrived there. Was he
despatched after the hour when Donald Stewart swore that he gave
Allan's message to James of the Glens, or earlier, with no knowledge
on James's part of the message carried by Donald? We really cannot
expect certainty of memory, after five months, as to hours of the
clock. Also James did not prove that he sent a message to Allan at
Coalisnacoan, bidding him draw on William Stewart for money; yet on
Friday, May 15, James did, by the pedlar, bid William Stewart give
Allan credit, and on Saturday, May 16, Allan did make a pen from a
bird's feather, and ink with powder and water, and write a letter for
money, on the strength of James's credit, to William Stewart. This is
certainly a difficulty for James, since he suggested John Breck
MacColl, a tenant of Appin's at Coalisnacoan, for the intermediary
between Allan and William Stewart, and Allan actually did employ this
man to carry his letter. But Allan knew this tenant well, as did
James, and there was nobody else at that desolate spot, Coalisnacoan,
whom Allan could employ. So lonely is the country that a few years ago
a gentleman of my acquaintance, climbing a rocky cliff, found the
bones of a man gnawed by foxes and eagles; a man who never had been
missed or inquired after. Remains of pencils and leather shoe strings
among the bones proved that the man had been a pedlar, like James
Stewart's messenger, who had fallen over the precipice in trying to
cross from Coalisnacoan to the road through Glencoe. But he never was
missed, nor is the date of his death known to this day.

The evidence of the lonely tenant at Coalisnacoan, as to his
interviews with Allan, is familiar to readers of _Kidnapped_. The
tenant had heard of the murder before he saw Allan. Two poor women,
who came up from Glencoe, told the story, saying that '_two men_ were
seen going from the spot where Glenure was killed, and that Allan
Breck was one of them.' Thus early does the mysterious figure of _the
other man_ haunt the evidence. The tenant's testimony was not regarded
as trustworthy by the Stewart party; it tended to prove that Allan
expected a change of clothes and money to be sent to him, and he also
wrote the letter (with a wood-pigeon's quill, and powder and water) to
William Stewart, asking for money. But Allan might do all this relying
on his own message sent by Donald Stewart, on the night of the murder,
to James of the Glens, and knowing, as he must have done, that William
Stewart was James's agent in his large financial operations.

On the whole, then, the evidence, even where it 'pinches' James most,
is by no means conclusive proof that on May 11 he had planned the
murder with Allan. If so, he must have begun to try to raise money
before the very day of the murder. James and his son were arrested on
May 16, and taken to Fort William; scores of other persons were
arrested, and the Campbells, to avenge Glenure, made the most minute
examinations of hundreds of people. Meanwhile Allan, having got 5_l._
and his French clothes by the agency of his cousin the pedlar,
decamped from Coalisnacoan in the night, and marched across country to
the house of an uncle in Rannoch. Thence he escaped to France, where
he was seen in Paris by an informant of Sir Walter Scott's in the dawn
of the French Revolution; a tall, thin, quiet old man, wearing the
cross of St. Louis, and looking on at a revolutionary procession.

The activities of the Campbells are narrated in their numerous
unpublished letters. We learn from a nephew of Glenure's that he had
been 'several days ago forewarned,' by whom we cannot guess;
tradition tells, as I have said, that he feared danger only in
Lochiel's country, Lochaber, and thought himself safe in Appin. The
warning, then, probably came from a Cameron in Lochaber, not from a
Stewart in Appin. In coincidence with this is a dark anonymous
blackmailing letter to Fassifern, as if _he_ had urged the writer to
do the deed:

'You will remember what you proposed on the night that Culchena was
buried, betwixt the hill and Culchena. I cannot deny but that I had
breathing' (a whisper), 'and not only that, but proposal of the same
to myself to do. Therefore you must excuse me, when it comes to the
push, for telling the thing that happened betwixt you and me that
night.... If you do not take this to heart, you may let it go as you
will.' (June 6, 1752.)

Fassifern, who had no hand in the murder, 'let it go,' and probably
handed the blackmailer's letter over to the Campbells. Later, ----,
---- of ----, the blackest villain in the country, offered to the
Government to accuse Fassifern of the murder. The writer of the
anonymous letter to Fassifern is styled 'Blarmachfildich,' or
'Blarmackfildoch,' in the correspondence. I think he was a Mr. Millar,
employed by Fassifern to agitate against Glenure.

In the beginning of July a man, suspected of being Allan, was arrested
at Annan on the Border, by a sergeant of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He
really seems to have changed clothes with Allan; at least he wore gay
French clothes like Allan's, but he was not that hero. Young
Ballachulish, at this time, knew that Allan was already across the
sea. Various guesses occur as to who _the other man_ was; for example,
a son of James of the Glens was suspected, so there _was_ another man.

The 'precognitions,' or private examinations of witnesses before the
trial, extended to more than seven hundred persons. It was matter of
complaint by the Stewart party that 'James Drummond's name appeared in
the list of witnesses;' this is Mr. Stevenson's James More, really
MacGregor, the son of Rob Roy, and father of Catriona, later Mrs.
David Balfour of Shaws, in _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_. 'James More's
character is reflected upon, and I believe he cannot be called worse
than he deserves,' says one of the Campbells. He alleges, however,
that in April, before the murder, James of the Glens visited James
More, then a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, 'caressed him,' and had a
private conversation with him. The abject James More averred that, in
this conversation, James of the Glens proposed that James More's
brother, Robin Oig, should kill Glenure for money. James More was not
examined at the trial of James of the Glens, perhaps because he had
already escaped, thanks to Catriona and collusion; but his evidence
appears to have reached the jury, almost all of them Campbells, who
sat at Inveraray, the Duke of Argyll on the bench, and made no
difficulty about finding James of the Glens 'Guilty.' To be sure,
James, if guilty, was guilty as an accessory to Allan, and that Allan
was guilty was not proved; he was not even before the court. It was
not proved that the bullets which slew Glenure fitted the bore of
James's small gun with which Allan was alleged to have perpetrated the
murder, but it was proved that the lock of that gun had only one
fault--it missed fire four times out of five, and, when the gun did
not miss fire, it did not carry straight--missed a blackcock, sitting!
_That_ gun was not the gun used in the murder.

The jury had the case for James of the Glens most clearly and
convincingly placed before them, in the speech of Mr. Brown for the
accused. He made, indeed, the very points on which I have insisted;
for example, that if James concerted a murder with Allan on May 11, he
would not begin to hunt for money for Allan's escape so late as May
14, the day of the murder. Again, he proved that, without any
information from James, Allan would _naturally_ send for money to
William Stewart, James's usual source of supply; while at Coalisnacoan
there was no man to go as messenger except the tenant, John Breck
MacColl. A few women composed his family, and, as John MacColl had
been the servant of James of the Glens, he was well known already to
Allan. In brief, there was literally no proof of concert, and had the
case been heard in Edinburgh, not in the heart of the Campbell
country, by a jury of Campbells, a verdict of 'Not Guilty' would have
been given: probably the jury would not even have fallen back upon
'Not Proven.' But, moved by clan hatred and political hatred, the
jury, on September 24, found a verdict against James of the Glens,
who, in a touching brief speech, solemnly asserted his innocence
before God, and chiefly regretted 'that after ages should think me
guilty of such a horrid and barbarous murder.'

He was duly hanged, and left hanging, on the little knoll above the
sea ferry, close to the Ballachulish Hotel.

And _the other man_?

Tradition avers that, on the day of the execution, he wished to give
himself up to justice, though his kinsmen told him that he could not
save James, and would merely share his fate; but, nevertheless, he
struggled so violently that his people mastered and bound him with
ropes, and laid him in a room still existing. Finally, it is said that
strange noises and knockings are still heard in that place, a
mysterious survival of strong human passions attested in other cases,
as on the supposed site of the murder of James I. of Scotland in
Perth.

Do I believe in this identification of _the other man_? I have marked
every trace of him in the documents, published or unpublished, and I
remain in doubt. But if Allan had an accessory in the crime, who was
seen at the place, an accomplice who, for example, supplied the gun,
perhaps fired the shot, while Allan fled to distract suspicion, that
accessory was probably the person named by legend. Though he was
certainly under suspicion, so were scores of other people. The crime
does not seem to me to have been the result of a conspiracy in Appin,
but the act of one hot-headed man or of two hot-headed men. I hope I
have kept the Celtic secret, and I defy anyone to discover _the other
man_ by aid of this narrative.

That James would have been quite safe with an Edinburgh jury was
proved by the almost contemporary case of the murder of the English
sergeant Davies. He was shot on the hillside, and the evidence against
the assassins was quite strong enough to convict them. But some of the
Highland witnesses averred that the phantasm of the sergeant had
appeared to them, and given information against the criminals, and
though there was testimony independent of the ghost's, his
interference threw ridicule over the affair. Moreover the Edinburgh
jury was in sympathy with Mr. Lockhart, the Jacobite advocate who
defended the accused. Though undeniably guilty, they were acquitted:
much more would James of the Glens have obtained a favourable verdict.
He was practically murdered under forms of law, and what was thought
of the Duke of Argyll's conduct on the bench is familiar to readers of
_Kidnapped_. I have never seen a copy of the pamphlet put forth after
the hanging by the Stewart party, and only know it through a reply in
the Campbell MSS.

The tragedy remains as fresh in the memories of the people of Appin
and Lochaber as if it were an affair of yesterday. The reason is that
the crime of cowardly assassination was very rare indeed among the
Highlanders. Their traditions were favourable to driving 'creaghs' of
cattle, and to clan raids and onfalls, but in the wildest regions the
traveller was far more safe than on Hounslow or Bagshot Heaths, and
shooting from behind a wall was regarded as dastardly.




V

_THE CARDINAL'S NECKLACE_


'Oh, Nature and Thackeray, which of you imitated the other?' One
inevitably thinks of the old question thus travestied, when one reads,
in the fifth edition, revised and augmented, of Monsieur
Funck-Brentano's _L'Affaire du Collier_,[10] the familiar story of
Jeanne de Valois, of Cardinal Rohan, and of the fatal diamond
necklace. Jeanne de Valois might have sat, though she probably did
not, for Becky Sharp. Her early poverty, her pride in the blood of
Valois, recall Becky's youth, and her boasts about 'the blood of the
Montmorencys.' Jeanne had her respectable friends, as Becky had the
Sedleys; like Becky, she imprudently married a heavy, unscrupulous
young officer; her expedients for living on nothing a year were
exactly those of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley; her personal charms, her fluent
tongue, her good nature, even, were those of that accomplished lady.
Finally she has her Marquis of Steyne in the wealthy, luxurious
Cardinal de Rohan; she robs him to a tune beyond the dreams of Becky,
and, incidentally, she drags to the dust the royal head of the fairest
and most unhappy of queens. Even now there seem to be people who
believe that Marie Antoinette was guilty, that she cajoled the
Cardinal, and robbed him of the diamonds, fateful as the jewels of
Eriphyle.

[Footnote 10: Hachette, Paris, 1903. The author has made valuable
additions and corrections.]

That theory is annihilated by M. Funck-Brentano. But the story is so
strangely complicated; the astuteness and the credulity of the
Cardinal are so oddly contrasted; a momentary folly of the Queen is so
astonishing and fatal; the general mismanagement of the Court is so
crazy, that, had we lived in Paris at the moment, perhaps we could
hardly have believed the Queen to be innocent. Even persons greatly
prejudiced in her favour might well have been deceived, and the people
'loveth to think the worst, and is hardly to be moved from that
opinion,' as was said of the Scottish public at the date of the Gowrie
conspiracy.

An infidelity of Henri II. of France to his wedded wife, Catherine de
Médicis, and the misplaced affection of Louis XV. for Madame du Barry,
were the remote but real causes that helped to ruin the House of
France. Without the amour of Henri II., there would have been no
Jeanne de Valois; without the hope that Louis XV. would stick at
nothing to please Madame du Barry, the diamond necklace would never
have been woven.

Henri II. loved, about 1550, a lady named Nicole de Savigny, and by
her had a son, Henri de Saint-Remy, whom he legitimated. Saint-Remy
was the great, great, great, great-grandfather of Jeanne de Valois,
the flower of minxes. Her father, a ruined man, dwelt in a corner of
the family _château_, a predacious, poaching, athletic, broken scion
of royalty, who drank and brawled with the peasants, and married his
mistress, a servant-girl. Jeanne was born at the _château_ of
Fontette, near Bar-sur-Aube, on April 22, 1756, and she and her
brother and little sister starved in their mouldering tower, kept
alive by the charity of the neighbours and of the _curé_, who begged
clothes for these descendants of kings. But their scutcheon was--and
Jeanne never forgot the fact--argent, three _fleurs de lys_ or, on a
fesse azure. The _noblesse_ of the family was later scrutinised by the
famous d'Hozier and pronounced authentic. Jeanne, with bare feet, and
straws in her hair, is said to have herded the cows, a discontented
indolent child, often beaten by her peasant mother. When her father
had eaten up his last acre, he and the family tramped to Paris in
1760. As Jeanne was then but four years old, I doubt if she ever
'drove the cattle home,' as M. Funck-Brentano finds recorded in the
MSS. of the advocate Target, who defended Jeanne's victim, Cardinal
Rohan.

The Valois crew lived in a village near Paris. Jeanne's mother turned
Jeanne's father out of doors, took a soldier in his place, and sent
the child to beg daily in the streets. 'Pity a poor orphan of the
blood of Valois,' she piped; 'alms, in God's name, for two orphans of
the blood of Valois!' When she brought home little she was cruelly
flogged, so she says, and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A
kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story,
found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went
back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence,
after she got possession of the diamonds.

By the age of twenty-one (1777), Jeanne was a pretty enchanting girl,
with a heart full of greed and envy; two years later she and her
sister fled from the convent where her protectress had placed them: a
merry society convent it was. A Madame de Surmont now gave them
shelter, at Bar-sur-Aube, and Jeanne married, very disreputably, her
heavy admirer, La Motte, calling himself Count, and to all appearance
a stupid young officer of the _gendarmerie_. The pair lived as such
people do, and again made prey of Madame de Boulainvilliers, in 1781,
at Strasbourg. The lady was here the guest of the sumptuous, vain,
credulous, but honourable Cardinal Rohan, by this time a man of fifty,
and the fanatical adorer of Cagliostro, with his philosopher's stone,
his crystal gazers, his seeresses, his Egyptian mysteries, and his
powers of healing diseases, and creating diamonds out of nothing.

Cagliostro doubtless lowered the Cardinal's moral and mental tone, but
it does not appear that he had any connection with the great final
swindle. In his supernormal gifts and graces the Cardinal did
steadfastly believe. Ten years earlier, Rohan had blessed Marie
Antoinette on her entry into France, and had been ambassador at the
Court of Maria Theresa, the Empress. A sportsman who once fired off
1,300 cartridges in a day (can this be true?), a splendid festive
churchman, who bewitched Vienna, and even the Emperor and Count
Kaunitz, by his lavish entertainments, Rohan made himself positively
loathed--for his corrupting luxury and his wicked wit--by the austere
Empress. She procured Rohan's recall, and so worked on her daughter,
Marie Antoinette, the young Queen of France, that the prelate, though
Grand Almoner, was socially boycotted by the Court, his letters of
piteous appeal to the Queen were not even opened, and his ambitions to
sway politics, like a Tencin or a Fleury, were ruined.

So here are Rohan, Cagliostro, and Jeanne all brought acquainted. The
Cardinal (and this is one of the oddest features in the affair) was to
come to believe that Jeanne was the Queen's most intimate friend, and
could and would make his fortune with her; while, at the same time, he
was actually relieving her by little tips of from two to five louis!
This he was doing, even after, confiding in Jeanne, he handed to her
the diamond necklace for the Queen, and, as he believed, had himself
a solitary midnight interview with her Majesty. If Jeanne was so great
with the Queen as Rohan supposed, how could Jeanne also be in need of
small charities? Rohan was a man of the world. His incredible
credulity seems a fact so impossible to accept that it was not
accepted by public opinion. The Queen, people could not but argue,
must have taken his enormous gifts, and then robbed and denounced him.
With the case before our eyes of Madame Humbert, who swindled scores
of hard-headed financiers by the flimsiest fables, we can no longer
deem the credulity of the Cardinal incredible, even though he
displayed on occasion a sharpness almost as miraculous as his
stupidity.

Rohan conferred a few small favours on Jeanne; her audacity was as
great as that of Madame Humbert, and, late in 1781, she established
herself both at Paris and in Versailles. The one card in her hand was
the blood of the Valois, and for long she could not play it to any
purpose. Her claims were too old and musty. If a lady of the name of
Stewart were to appear to-day, able to prove that she was of royal
blood, as being descended from Francis, Earl of Bothwell (who used to
kidnap James VI., was forfeited, and died in exile about 1620), she
could not reasonably expect to be peculiarly cherished and comforted
by our royal family. Now Jeanne's claims were no better, and no
nearer, in 1781, than those of our supposed Stewart adventuress in
1904. But Jeanne was sanguine. Something must be done, by hook or by
crook, for the blood of the Valois. She must fasten on her great
relations, the royal family. By 1783 Jeanne was pawning her furniture
and dining at the expense of her young admirers, or of her servants,
for, somehow, they were attached to a mistress who did not pay their
wages. She bought goods on her credit as a countess, and sold them on
the same day. She fainted in the crowd at Versailles, and Madame
Elizabeth sent her a few louis, and had her tiny pension doubled.
Jeanne fainted again under the eyes of the Queen, who never noticed
her.

Her plan was to persuade small suitors that she could get them what
they wanted by her backstairs influence with her royal cousin; she had
a lover, Retaux de Villette, who was an expert forger, and by April
1784, relying on his skill, she began to hint to Rohan that she could
win for him the Queen's forgiveness. Her Majesty had seen her faint
and had been full of kindness. Nothing should be refused to the
interesting daughter of the Valois. Letters from the Queen to Jeanne,
forged by Villette on paper stamped with blue _fleurs de lys_, were
laid before the eyes of the infatuated prelate. Villette later
confessed to his forgeries; all confessed; but as all recanted their
confessions, this did not impress the public. The letters proved that
the Queen was relenting, as regarded Rohan. Cagliostro confirmed the
fact. At a _séance_ in Rohan's house, he introduced a niece of
Jeanne's husband, a girl of fifteen, who played the part of crystal
gazer, and saw, in the crystal, whatever Cagliostro told her to see.
All was favourable to the wishes of Rohan, who was as easy of belief
as any spiritualist, being entirely dominated by the Neapolitan.
Cagliostro, none the less, knew nothing of the great final _coup_,
despite his clairvoyance.

So far, in the summer of 1784, the great diamond fraud had not risen
into Jeanne's consciousness. Her aim was merely to convince the
Cardinal that she could win for him the Queen's favour, and then to
work upon his gratitude. It was in July 1784 that Jeanne's husband
made the acquaintance of Marie Laguay, a pretty and good-humoured but
quite 'unfortunate' young woman--'the height of honesty and
dissoluteness'--who might be met in the public gardens, chaperoned
solely by a nice little boy. Jeanne de Valois was not of a jealous
temperament. Mademoiselle Laguay was the friend of her husband, the
tawdry Count. For Jeanne that was enough. She invited the young lady
to her house, and by her royal fantasy created her Baronne Gay d'Oliva
(_Valoi_, an easy anagram).

She presently assured the Baronne that the Queen desired her
collaboration in a practical joke, her Majesty would pay 600_l._ for
the freak. This is the Baronne's own version; her innocence, she
averred, readily believed that Marie Antoinette desired her
assistance.

'You are only asked to give, some evening, a note and a rose to a
great lord, in an alley of the gardens of Versailles. My husband will
bring you hither to-morrow evening.'

Jeanne later confessed that the Baronne really was stupid enough to be
quite satisfied that the whole affair was a jest.

Judged by their portraits, d'Oliva, who was to personate the Queen, in
an interview with the Cardinal, was not at all like Marie Antoinette.
Her short, round, buxom face bears no resemblance to the long and
noble outlines of the features of the Queen. But both women were fair,
and of figures not dissimilar. On August 11, 1784, Jeanne dressed up
d'Oliva in the _chemise_ or _gaulle_, the very simple white blouse
which Marie Antoinette wears in the contemporary portrait by Madame
Vigée-Lebrun, a portrait exhibited at the Salon of 1783. The ladies,
with La Motte, then dined at the best restaurant in Versailles, and
went out into the park. The sky was heavy, without moon or starlight,
and they walked into the sombre mass of the Grove of Venus, so styled
from a statue of the goddess which was never actually placed there.
Nothing could be darker than the thicket below the sullen sky.

A shadow of a man appeared: _Vous voilà!_ said the Count, and the
shadow departed. It was Villette, the forger of the Queen's letters,
the lover and accomplice of Jeanne de Valois.

Then the gravel of a path crackled under the feet of three men. One
approached, heavily cloaked. D'Oliva was left alone, a rose fell from
her hand, she had a letter in her pocket which she forgot to give to
the cloaked man, who knelt, and kissed the skirt of her dress. She
murmured something; the cloaked Cardinal heard, or thought he heard,
her say: 'You may hope that the past is forgotten.'

Another shadow flitted past, whispering: 'Quick! Quick! Come on! Here
are Madame and Madame d'Artois!'

They dispersed. Later the Cardinal recognised the whispering shadow
that fled by, in Villette, the forger. How could he recognise a
fugitive shade vaguely beheld in a dark wood, on a sultry and starless
night? If he mistook the girl d'Oliva for the Queen, what is his
recognition of the shadow worth?

The conspirators had a jolly supper, and one Beugnot, a friend of
Jeanne, not conscious of the plot, escorted the Baronne d'Oliva back
to her rooms in Paris.

The trick, the transparent trick was played, and Jeanne could extract
from the Cardinal what money she wanted, in the name of the Queen that
gave him a rose in the Grove of Venus. Letters from the Queen were
administered at intervals by Jeanne, and the prelate never dreamed of
comparing them with the authentic handwriting of Marie Antoinette.

We naturally ask ourselves, was Rohan in love with the daughter of the
Valois? Does his passion account for his blindness? Most authors have
believed what Jeanne later proclaimed, that she was the Cardinal's
mistress. This the divine steadily denied. There was no shadow of
proof that they were even on familiar terms, except a number of erotic
letters, which Jeanne showed to a friend, Beugnot, saying that they
were from the Cardinal, and then burned. The Cardinal believed all
things, in short, and verified nothing, in obedience to his dominating
idea--the recovery of the Queen's good graces.

Meanwhile, Jeanne drew on him for large sums, which the Queen, she
said, needed for acts of charity. It was proved that Jeanne instantly
invested the money in her own name, bought a large house with another
loan, and filled it with splendid furniture. She was as extravagant as
she was greedy; _alieni appetens, sui profusa_.

The Cardinal was in Alsace, at his bishopric, when in
November-December 1784, Jeanne was brought acquainted with the
jewellers, Böhmer and Bassenge, who could not find a customer for
their enormous and very hideous necklace of diamonds, left on their
hands by the death of Louis XV. The European Courts were poor; Marie
Antoinette had again and again refused to purchase a bauble like a
'comforter' made of precious stones, or to accept it from the King.
'We have more need of a ship of war,' she said, and would not buy,
though the jeweller fell on his knees, and threatened to drown
himself. There were then no American millionaires, and the thickest
and ugliest of necklaces was 'eating its head off,' for the stones had
been bought with borrowed money.

In the jewellers Jeanne found new victims; they, too, believed in her
credit with the Queen; they, too, asked no questions, and held that
she could find them a purchaser. Jeanne imposed on them thus, while
the Cardinal was still in Alsace. He arrived at Paris in January 1785.
He learned, from Jeanne, that the Queen wished him to deal for her
with the jewellers! She would pay the price, 60,000_l._, by quarterly
instalments.

The Cardinal could believe that the Queen, who, as he supposed, had
given him a darkling interview, would entrust him with such a
commission, for an article which she had notoriously refused. But
there is a sane spot in every man's mind, and on examining the
necklace (January 24, 1785), he said that it was in very poor taste.
However, as the Queen wanted to wear it at a ceremony on February 2,
he arranged the terms, and became responsible for the money. His
guarantee was a document produced by Jeanne, and signed 'Marie
Antoinette de France.' As Cagliostro pointed out to Rohan later, too
late, the Queen could not possibly use this signature. Neither the
prelate nor the tradesmen saw the manifest absurdity. Rohan carried
the necklace to Jeanne, who gave it to the alleged messenger of the
Queen. Rohan only saw the _silhouette_ of this man, in a dusky room,
through a glass door, but he later declared that in him he recognised
the fleeting shade who whispered the warning to fly, in the dark Grove
of Venus. It was Villette, the forger.

Naturally people asked, 'If you could not tell the Queen from Mlle.
d'Oliva when you kissed her robe in the grove, how could you
recognise, through a dim glass door, the man of whom you had only
caught a glimpse as a fleeting shadow? If you are so clever, why, it
_was_ the Queen whom you met in the wood. You cannot have been
mistaken in her.'

These obvious arguments told against the Queen as well as against the
Cardinal.

The Queen did not wear the jewels at the feast for which she had
wanted them. Strange to say, she never wore them at all, to the
surprise of the vendors and of the Cardinal. The necklace was, in
fact, hastily cut to pieces with a blunt heavy knife, in Jeanne's
house; her husband crossed to England, and sold many stones, and
bartered more for all sorts of trinkets, to Grey, of New Bond Street,
and Jeffreys, of Piccadilly. Villette had already been arrested with
his pockets full of diamonds, but the luck of the House of Valois, and
the astuteness of Jeanne, procured his release. So the diamonds were,
in part, 'dumped down' in England; many were kept by the La Mottes;
and Jeanne paid some pressing debts in diamonds.

The happy La Mottes, with six carriages, a stud of horses, silver
plate of great value, and diamonds glittering on many portions of
their raiment, now went off to astonish their old friends at
Bar-sur-Aube. The inventories of their possessions read like pages out
of _The Arabian Nights_. All went merrily, till at a great
ecclesiastical feast, among her friends the aristocracy, on August 17,
1785, Jeanne learned that the Cardinal had been arrested at
Versailles, in full pontificals, when about to celebrate the Mass. She
rushed from table, fled to Versailles, and burned her papers. She
would not fly to England; she hoped to brazen out the affair.

The arrest of the Cardinal was caused thus: On July 12, 1785, the
jeweller, Böhmer, went to Versailles with a letter of thanks to the
Queen, dictated by Rohan. The date for the payment of the first
instalment had arrived, nothing had been paid, a reduction in price
had been suggested and accepted. Böhmer gave the letter of thanks to
the Queen, but the Controller-General entered, and Böhmer withdrew,
without waiting for a reply. The Queen presently read the letter of
thanks, could not understand it, and sent for the jeweller, who had
gone home. Marie Antoinette thought he was probably mad, certainly a
bore, and burned his note before the eyes of Madame Campan.

'Tell the man, when you next see him, that I do not want diamonds, and
shall never buy any more.'

Fatal folly! Had the Queen insisted on seeing Böhmer, all would have
been cleared up, and her innocence established. Böhmer's note spoke of
the recent arrangements, of the jeweller's joy that the greatest of
queens possesses the handsomest of necklaces--and Marie Antoinette
asked no questions!

Jeanne now (August 3) did a great stroke. She told Bassenge that the
Queen's guarantee to the Cardinal was a forgery. She calculated that
the Cardinal, to escape the scandal, would shield her, would sacrifice
himself and pay the 60,000_l._

But the jewellers dared not carry the news to the Cardinal. They went
to Madame Campan, who said that they had been gulled: the Queen had
never received the jewels. Still, they did not tell the Cardinal.
Jeanne now sent Villette out of the way, to Geneva, and on August 4
Bassenge asked the Cardinal whether he was sure that the man who was
to carry the jewels to the Queen had been honest? A pleasant question!
The Cardinal kept up his courage; all was well, he could not be
mistaken. Jeanne, with cunning audacity, did not fly: she went to her
splendid home at Bar-sur-Aube.

Villette was already out of reach; d'Oliva, with her latest lover, was
packed off to Brussels; there was no proof against Jeanne; her own
flight would have been proof. The Cardinal could not denounce her; he
had insulted the Queen by supposing that she gave him a lonely
midnight tryst, a matter of high treason; the Cardinal could not
speak. He consulted Cagliostro. 'The guarantee is forged,' said the
sage; 'the Queen could not sign "Marie Antoinette de France." Throw
yourself at the King's feet, and confess all.' The wretched Rohan now
compared the Queen's forged notes to him with authentic letters of
hers in the possession of his family. The forgery was conspicuous, but
he did not follow the advice of Cagliostro. On August 12, the Queen
extracted the whole facts, as far as known to them, from the
jewellers. On August 15, the day of the Assumption, when the Cardinal
was to celebrate, the King asked him: 'My cousin, what is this tale of
a diamond necklace bought by you in the name of the Queen?'

The unhappy man, unable to speak coherently, was allowed to write the
story, in fifteen lines.

'How could you believe,' asked the Queen with angry eyes, 'that I, who
have not spoken to you for eight years, entrusted you with this
commission?'

How indeed could he believe it?

He offered to pay for the jewels. The thing might still have been
hushed up. The King is blamed, first for publicly arresting Rohan as
he did, an enormous scandal; next for handing over the case, for
public trial, to the Parlement, the hereditary foes of the Court.
Fréteau de Saint-Just, one of the Bar, cried: 'What a triumph for
Liberal ideas! A Cardinal a thief! The Queen implicated! Mud on the
crosier and the sceptre!'

He had his fill of Liberal ideas, for he was guillotined on June 14,
1794!

Kings and queens are human beings. They like a fair and open trial.
Mary Stuart prayed for it in vain, from the Estates of Scotland, and
from Elizabeth. Charles I. asked for public trial in vain, from the
Estates of Scotland, at the time of the unsolved puzzle of 'The
Incident.' Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette had the publicity they
wanted; to their undoing. The Parlement was to acquit Rohan of the
theft of the necklace (a charge which Jeanne tried to support by a
sub-plot of romantic complexity), and that acquittal was just. But
nothing was said of the fatal insult which he had dealt to the Queen.
Villette, who had forged the royal name, was merely exiled, left free
to publish fatal calumnies abroad, though high treason, as times went,
was about the measure of his crime. Gay d'Oliva, whose personation of
the Queen also verged on treason, was merely acquitted with a
recommendation 'not to do it again.' Pretty, a young mother, and
profoundly dissolute, she was the darling of Liberal and _sensible_
hearts.

Jeanne de Valois, indeed, was whipped and branded, but Jeanne, in
public opinion, was the scapegoat of a cruel princess, and all the mud
was thrown on the face of the guiltless Queen. The friends of Rohan
were all the clergy, all the many nobles of his illustrious house, all
the courtly foes of the Queen (they began by the basest calumnies,
the ruin that the people achieved), all the friends of Liberal ideas,
who soon, like Fréteau de Saint-Just, had more of Liberalism than they
liked.

These were the results which the King obtained by offering to the
Cardinal his choice between the royal verdict and that of the public
Court of Justice. Rohan said that, if the King would pronounce him
innocent, he would prefer to abide by the royal decision. He _was_
innocent of all but being a presumptuous fool; the King might, even
now, have recognised the fact. Mud would have been thrown, but not all
the poached filth of the streets of Paris. On the other hand, had
Louis withheld the case from public trial, we might still be doubtful
of the Queen's innocence. Napoleon acknowledged it: 'The Queen was
innocent, and to make her innocence the more public, she wished the
Parlement to be the judge. The result was that she was taken to be
guilty.' Napoleon thought that the King should have taken the case
into his own hand. This might have been wisdom for the day, but not
for securing the verdict of posterity. The pyramidal documents of the
process, still in existence, demonstrate the guilt of the La Mottes
and their accomplices at every step, and prove the stainless character
of the Queen.

La Motte could not be caught. He had fled to Edinburgh, where he lived
with an aged Italian teacher of languages. This worthy man offered to
sell him for 10,000_l._, and a pretty plot was arranged by the French
ambassador to drug La Motte, put him on board a collier at South
Shields and carry him to France. But the old Italian lost heart, and,
after getting 1,000_l._ out of the French Government in advance,
deemed it more prudent to share the money with the Count. Perhaps the
Count invented the whole stratagem; it was worthy of the husband and
pupil of Jeanne de Valois. That poor lady's cause was lost when
Villette and Gay d'Oliva were brought back across the frontier,
confessed, and corroborated each other's stories. Yet she made a
wonderfully good fight, changing her whole defence into another as
plausible and futile, before the very eyes of the Court, and doing her
best to ruin Rohan as a thief, and Cagliostro as the forger of the
Queen's guarantee. The bold Neapolitan was acquitted, but compelled to
leave the country, and attempt England, where the phlegmatic islanders
trusted him no more than they trusted Madame Humbert. We expended our
main capital of credulity on Titus Oates and Bedloe, and the
warming-pan lie--our imaginative innocence being most accessible in
the region of religion. The French are more open to the appeal of
romance, and to dissolute honesty in the person of Miss Gay d'Oliva,
to injured innocence as represented by Jeanne de Valois. That class of
rogues suits a gay people, while we are well mated with such a
seductive divine as Dr. Oates.




VI

_THE MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER: THE CHILD OF EUROPE_


The story of Kaspar Hauser, a boy, apparently idiotic, who appeared,
as if from the clouds, in Nuremberg (1828), divided Germany into
hostile parties, and caused legal proceedings as late as 1883. Whence
this lad came, and what his previous adventures had been, has never
been ascertained. His death by a dagger-wound, in 1833--whether
inflicted by his own hand or that of another--deepened the mystery.
According to one view, the boy was only a waif and an impostor, who
had strayed from some peasant home, where nobody desired his return.
According to the other theory, he was the Crown Prince of Baden,
stolen as an infant in the interests of a junior branch of the House,
reduced to imbecility by systematic ill-treatment, turned loose on the
world at the age of sixteen, and finally murdered, lest his secret
origin might be discovered.

I state first the theory of the second party in the dispute, which
believed that Kaspar was some great one: I employ language as
romantic as my vocabulary affords.

       *       *       *       *       *

Darkness in Karlsruhe! 'Tis the high noon of night: October 15, 1812.
Hark to the tread of the Twelve Hours as they pass on the palace
clock, and join their comrades that have been! The vast corridors are
still; in the shadows lurk two burly minions of ambitious crime,
Burkard and Sauerbeck. Is that a white moving shadow which approaches
through the gloom? There arises a shriek, a heavy body falls, 'tis a
lacquey who has seen and recognised _The White Lady of the Grand Ducal
House_, that walks before the deaths of Princes. Burkard and Sauerbeck
spurn the inanimate body of the menial witness. The white figure,
bearing in her arms a sleeping child, glides to the tapestried wall,
and vanishes through it, into the Chamber of the Crown Prince, a babe
of fourteen days. She returns carrying _another_ unconscious infant
form, she places it in the hands of the ruffian Sauerbeck, she
disappears. The miscreant speeds with the child through a postern into
the park, you hear the trample of four horses, and the roll of the
carriage on the road. Next day there is silence in the palace, broken
but by the shrieks of a bereaved though Royal (or at least Grand
Ducal) mother. Her babe lies a corpse! The Crown Prince has died in
the night! The path to the throne lies open to the offspring of the
Countess von Hochberg, morganatic wife of the reigning Prince, Karl
Friedrich, and mother of the children of Ludwig Wilhelm August, his
youngest son.

Sixteen years fleet by; years rich in Royal crimes. 'Tis four of a
golden Whit Monday afternoon, in old Nuremberg, May 26, 1828. The town
lies empty, dusty, silent; her merry people are rejoicing in the green
wood, and among the suburban beer-gardens. One man alone, a shoemaker,
stands by the door of his house in the Unschlitt Plas: around him lie
the vacant streets of the sleeping city. His eyes rest on the form,
risen as it were out of the earth or fallen from the skies, of a boy,
strangely clad, speechless, incapable either of standing erect or of
moving his limbs. That boy is the Royal infant placed of yore by the
White Shadow in the hands of the cloaked ruffian. Thus does the Crown
Prince of Baden return from the darkness to the daylight! He names
himself KASPAR HAUSER. He is to die by the dagger of a cruel courtier,
or of a hireling English Earl.

Thus briefly, and, I trust, impressively, have I sketched the history
of Kaspar Hauser, 'the Child of Europe,' as it was presented by
various foreign pamphleteers, and, in 1892, by Miss Elizabeth E.
Evans.[11] But, as for the 'authentic records' on which the partisans
of Kaspar Hauser based their version, they are anonymous,
unauthenticated, discredited by the results of a libel action in
1883; and, in short, are worthless and impudent rubbish.

[Footnote 11: _The Story of Kaspar Hauser from Authentic Records._
Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1892.]

On all sides, indeed, the evidence as to Kaspar Hauser is in
bewildering confusion. In 1832, four years after his appearance, a
book about him was published by Paul John Anselm Von Feuerbach. The
man was mortal, had been a professor, and, though a legal reformer and
a learned jurist, was 'a nervous invalid' when he wrote, and he soon
after died of paralysis (or poison according to Kasparites). He was
approaching a period of life in which British judges write books to
prove that Bacon was Shakespeare, and his arguments were like theirs.
His _Kaspar Hauser_ is composed in a violently injudicial style. 'To
seek the giant perpetrator of such a crime' (as the injustice to
Kaspar), 'it would be necessary ... to be in possession of Joshua's
ram's horns, or at least of Oberon's horn, in order, for some time at
least, to suspend the activity of the powerful enchanted Colossi that
guard the golden gates of certain castles,' that is, of the palace at
Karlsruhe. Such early Nuremberg records of Kaspar's first exploits as
existed were ignored by Feuerbach, who told Lord Stanhope, that any
reader of these 'would conceive Kaspar to be an impostor.' 'They ought
to be burned.' The records, which were read and in part published, by
the younger Meyer (son of one of Kaspar's tutors) and by President
Karl Schmausz, have disappeared, and, in 1883, Schmausz could only
attest the general accuracy of Meyer's excerpts from the town's
manuscripts.

Taking Feuerbach's romantic narrative of 1832, we find him averring
that, about 4.30 P.M. on Whit Monday, May 26, 1828, a citizen,
unnamed, was loitering at his door, in the Unschlitt Plas, Nuremberg,
intending to sally out by the New Gate, when he saw a young peasant,
standing in an attitude suggestive of intoxication, and apparently
suffering from locomotor ataxia, 'unable to govern fully the movements
of his legs.' The citizen went to the boy, who showed him a letter
directed to the captain of a cavalry regiment. The gallant captain
lived near the New Gate (654 paces from the citizen's house), and
thither the young peasant walked with the citizen. So he _could_
'govern fully the movements of his legs.' At the house, the captain
being out, the boy said, 'I would be a horseman as my father was,'
also 'Don't know.' Later he was taken to the prison, up a steep hill,
and the ascent to his room was one of over ninety steps. Thus he could
certainly walk, and when he spoke of himself he said 'I' like other
people. Later he took to speaking of himself as 'Kaspar,' in the
manner of small children, and some hysterical patients under
hypnotism. But this was an after-thought, for Kaspar's line came to be
that he had only learned a few words, like a parrot, words which he
used to express all senses indifferently. His eye-sight, when he first
appeared, seems to have been normal, at the prison he wrote his own
name as 'Kaspar Hauser,' and covered a sheet of paper with writing.
Later he could see best in the dark.

So says Feuerbach, in 1832. What he does not say is whence he got his
information as to Kaspar's earliest exploits. Now our earliest
evidence, on oath, before a magistrate, is dated November 4, 1829.
George Weichmann, shoemaker (Feuerbach's anonymous 'citizen'), then
swore that, on May 26, 1828, he saw Kaspar, not making paralysed
efforts to walk, but trudging down a hilly street, shouting 'Hi!' ('or
any loud cry'), and presently asking, 'with tolerable distinctness,'
'New Gate Street?' He took the boy that way, and the boy gave him the
letter for the captain. Weichmann said that they had better ask for
him at the New Gate Guard House, and the boy said 'Guard House? Guard
House? New Gate no doubt just built?' He said he came from Ratisbon,
and was in Nuremberg for the first time, but clearly did not
understand what Weichmann meant when he inquired as to the chances of
war breaking out. In May 1834 Weichmann repeated his evidence as to
Kaspar's power of talking and walking, and was corroborated by one
Jacob Beck, not heard of in 1829. On December 20, 1829, Merk, the
captain's servant, spoke to Kaspar's fatigue, 'he reeled as he
walked,' and would answer no questions. In 1834 Merk expanded, and
said 'we had a long chat.' Kaspar averred that he could read and
write, and had crossed the frontier daily on his way to school. 'He
did not know where he came from.' Certainly Merk, in 1834, remembered
much more than in 1829. Whether he suppressed facts in 1829, or, in
1834, invented fables, we do not know. The cavalry captain (November
2, 1829) remembered several intelligent remarks made by Kaspar. His
dress was new and clean (denied by Feuerbach), he was tired and
footsore. The evidence of the police, taken in 1834, was remote in
time, but went to prove that Kaspar's eyesight and power of writing
were normal. Feuerbach absolutely discredits all the sworn evidence of
1829, without giving his own sources. The early evidence shows that
Kaspar could both walk and talk, and see normally, by artificial and
natural light, all of which is absolutely inconsistent with Kaspar's
later account of himself.

The personal property of Kaspar was a horn rosary, and several
Catholic tracts with prayers to the Guardian Angel, and so forth.
Feuerbach holds that these were furnished by 'devout villains'--a very
sound Protestant was Feuerbach--and that Kaspar was ignorant of the
being of a Deity, at least of a Protestant Deity. The letter carried
by the boy said that the writer first took charge of him, as an
infant, in 1812, and had never let him 'take a single step out of my
house.... I have already taught him to read and write, _and he writes
my handwriting exactly as I do_.' In the same hand was a letter in
Latin characters, purporting to come from Kaspar's mother, 'a poor
girl,' as the author of the German letter was 'a poor day-labourer.'
Humbug as I take Kaspar to have been, I am not sure that he wrote
these pieces. If not, somebody else was in the affair; somebody who
wanted to get rid of Kaspar. As that youth was an useless, false,
convulsionary, and hysterical patient, no one was likely to want to
keep him, if he could do better. No specified reward was offered at
the time for information about Kaspar; no portrait of him was then
published and circulated. The Burgomaster, Binder, had a portrait, and
a facsimile of Kaspar's signature engraved, but Feuerbach would not
allow them to be circulated, heaven knows why.

How Kaspar fell, as it were from the clouds, and unseen, into the
middle of Nuremberg, even on a holiday when almost every one was out
of town, is certainly a puzzle. The earliest witnesses took him for a
journeyman tailor lad (he was about sixteen), and perhaps nobody paid
any attention to a dusty travelling tradesman, or groom out of place.
Feuerbach (who did not see Kaspar till July) says that his feet were
covered with blisters, the gaoler says that they were merely swollen
by the tightness of his boots.

Once in prison, Kaspar, who asked to be taken home, adopted the _rôle_
of 'a semi-unconscious animal,' playing with toy horses, 'blind though
he saw,' yet, not long after, he wrote a minute account of all that he
had then observed. He could only eat bread and water: meat made him
shudder, and Lord Stanhope says that this peculiarity did occur in the
cases of some peasant soldiers. He had no sense of hearing, which
means, perhaps, that he did not think of pretending to be amazed by
the sound of church bells till he had been in prison for some days.
Till then he had been deaf to their noise. This is Feuerbach's story,
but we shall see that it is contradicted by Kaspar himself, in
writing. Thus the alleged facts may be explained without recourse even
to a theory of intermittent deafness. Kaspar was no more deaf than
blind. He 'was all there,' and though, ten days after his arrival, he
denied that he had ever seen Weichmann, in ten days more his memory
for faces was deemed extraordinary, and he minutely described all
that, on May 26 and later, he had observed. Kaspar was taught to write
by the gaoler's little boy, though he could write when he came--in the
same hand as the author of his mysterious letter. Though he had but
half a dozen words on May 26, according to Feuerbach, by July 7 he had
furnished Binder with his history--pretty quick work! Later in 1828 he
was able to write that history himself. In 1829 he completed a work of
autobiography.

Kaspar wrote that till the age of sixteen he was kept in 'a prison,'
'perhaps six or seven feet long, four broad, and five high.' There
were two small windows, with closed black wooden shutters. He lay on
straw, lived on bread and water, and played with toy horses, and blue
and red ribbons. That he could see colours in total darkness is a
proof of his inconsistent fables, or of his 'hyperæsthesia'--abnormal
acuteness of the senses. 'The man' who kept him was not less
hyperæsthetic, for he taught Kaspar to write in the dark. He never
heard any noise, but avers that, in prison, he was alarmed by the town
clock striking, on the first morning, though Feuerbach says that he
did not hear the bells for several days.

Such is Kaspar's written account (1829); the published account of July
1828, derived from 'the expressions of a half-dumb animal' (as
Feuerbach puts it), is much more prolix and minute in detail. The
animal said that he had sat on the ground, and never seen daylight,
till he came to Nuremberg. He used to be hocussed with water of an
evil taste, and wake in a clean shirt. 'The man' once hit him and hurt
him, for making too much noise. The man taught him his letters and the
Arabic numerals. Later he gave him instructions in the art of
standing. Next he took him out, and taught him about nine words. He
was made by the man to walk he knew not how far, or how long, the man
leading him. Nobody saw this extraordinary pair on the march.
Feuerbach, who maintains that Kaspar's feet were covered with cruel
blisters, from walking, also supposes that 'perhaps for the greater
part of the way' he was carried in a carriage or waggon! Whence then
the cruel blisters caused by walking? There is medical evidence that
his legs were distorted by confinement, but the medical _post-mortem_
evidence says that this was not the case. He told Binder that his
windows were shuttered: he told Hiltel, the gaoler, that from his
windows he saw 'a pile of wood and above it the top of a tree.'

Obviously Kaspar's legends about himself, whether spoken in June 1828,
or written in February 1829, are absurdly false. He was for three
weeks in the tower, and was daily visited by the curious. Yet in these
three weeks the half-conscious animal 'learned to read tolerably well,
to count, to write figures' (_that_ he could do when he arrived,
Feuerbach says), 'he made progress in writing a good hand, and learned
a simple tune on the harpsichord,' pretty well for a half-unconscious
animal.

In July 1828, after being adopted by the excited town of Nuremberg, he
was sent to be educated by and live with a schoolmaster named Daumer,
and was studied by Feuerbach. They found, in Kaspar, a splendid
example of the 'sensitive,' and a noble proof of the powers of 'animal
magnetism.' In Germany, at this time, much was talked and written
about 'somnambulism' (the hypnotic state), and about a kind of 'animal
magnetism' which, in accordance with Mesmer's theory, was supposed to
pass between stars, metals, magnets, and human beings. The effects
produced on the patient by the hypnotist (now ascribed to
'suggestion') were attributed to a 'magnetic efflux,' and
Reichenbach's subjects saw strange currents flowing from metals and
magnets. His experiments have never, perhaps, been successfully
repeated, though hysterical persons have pretended to feel the
traditional effects, even when non-magnetic objects were pointed at
them. Now Kaspar was really a 'sensitive,' or feigned to be one, with
hysterical cunning. Anything unusual would throw him into convulsions,
or reduce him to unconsciousness. He was addicted to the tears of
sensibility. Years later Meyer read to him an account of the Noachian
Deluge, and he wept bitterly. Meyer thought this rather too much, the
Deluge being so remote an event, and, after that, though Meyer read
pathetic things in his best manner, Kaspar remained unmoved. He wrote
a long account of his remarkable magnetic sensations during and before
the first thunderstorm after his arrival at Nuremberg. Yet, before his
appearance there, he must have heard plenty of thunderstorms, though
he pretended that this was his first. The sight of the moon produced
in him 'emotions of horror.' He had visions, like the Rev. Ansel
Bourne, later to be described, of a beautiful male figure in a white
garment, who gave him a garland. He was taken to a 'somnambulist,' and
felt 'magnetic' pulls and pushes, and a strong current of air. Indeed
the tutor, Daumer, shared these sensations, obviously by virtue of
'suggestion.' They are out of fashion, the doctrine of animal
magnetism being as good as exploded, and nobody feels pulled or pushed
or blown upon, when he consults Mrs. Piper or any other 'medium.'

From a letter of Feuerbach of September 20, 1828, we learn that
Kaspar, '_without being an albino_,' can see as well in utter darkness
as in daylight. Perhaps the man who taught Kaspar to write, in the
dark, _was_ an albino: Kaspar never saw his face. Kaspar's powers of
vision abated, as he took to beef, but he remained hyperæsthetic, and
could see better in a bad light than Daumer or Feuerbach. Some
'dowsers,' we know, can detect subterranean water, by the sensations
of their hands, without using a twig, or divining rod, and others can
'spot' gold hidden under the carpet, with the twig. Kaspar, merely
with the bare hand, detected (without touching it?) a needle under a
table cloth. He gradually lost these gifts, and the theory seems to
have been that they were the result of his imprisonment in the dark,
and a proof of it. The one thing certain is that Kaspar had the
sensitive or 'mediumistic' temperament, which usually--though not
always--is accompanied by hysteria, while hysteria means cunning and
fraud, whether conscious or not so conscious. Meanwhile the boy was in
the hands of men credulous, curious, and, in the case of Daumer,
capable of odd sensations induced by suggestion. From such a boy, in
such company, the truth could not be expected, above all if, like some
other persons of his class, he was subject to 'dissociation' and
obliviousness as to his own past.

Rather curiously we find in Feuerbach's own published collection of
Trials the case of a boy, Sörgel, who had 'paroxysms of second
consciousness ... of which he was ignorant upon returning to his
ordinary state of consciousness.' We have also the famous case of the
atheistic carpenter, Ansel Bourne, who was struck deaf, dumb, and
blind, and miraculously healed, in a dissenting chapel, to the great
comfort of 'a large and warm congregation.' Mr. Bourne then became a
preacher, but later forgot who he was, strolled to a distant part of
the States, called himself Browne, set up a 'notions store,' and, one
day, awoke among his notions to the consciousness that he was Bourne,
not Browne, a preacher, not a dealer in cheap futilities. Bourne was
examined, under hypnotism, by Professor William James and others.[12]

[Footnote 12: _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_,
vol. vii. pp. 221-257.]

Many such instances of 'ambulatory automatism' are given. In my view,
Kaspar was, to put it mildly, an ambulatory automatist, who had
strayed away, like the Rev. Mr. Bourne, from some place where nobody
desired his return: rather his lifelong absence was an object of hope.
The longer Kaspar lived, the more frequently was he detected in every
sort of imposture that could make him notorious, or enable him to
shirk work.

Kaspar had for months been the pet mystery of Nuremberg. People were
sure that, like the mysterious prisoner of Pignerol, Les Exiles, and
the Isle Sainte-Marguerite (1669-1703?), Kaspar was some great one,
'kept out of his own.' Now the prisoner of Pignerol was really a
valet, and Kaspar was a peasant. Some thought him a son of Napoleon:
others averred (as we saw) that he was the infant son of the Grand
Duke Karl of Baden, born in 1812, who had not died within a fortnight
of his birth, but been spirited away by a lady disguised as the
spectral 'White Lady of Baden,' an aristocratic _ban-shie_. The subtle
conspirators had bred the Grand Duke Kaspar in a dark den, the theory
ran, hoping that he would prove, by virtue of such education, an
acceptable recruit for the Bavarian cavalry, and that no questions
would be asked. Unluckily questions were now being asked, for a boy
who could only occasionally see and hear was not (though he could
smell a cemetery at a distance of five hundred yards), an useful man
on a patrol, at least the military authorities thought not. Had they
known that Kaspar could see in the dark, they might have kept him as a
guide in night attacks, but they did not know. The promising young
hussar (he rode well but clumsily) was thus left in the hands of
civilians: the Grand Ducal secret might be discovered, so an assassin
was sent to take off the young prince.

The wonder was not unnaturally expressed that Kaspar had not smelled
out the villain, especially as he was probably the educational
albino, who taught him to write in the dark. On hearing of this,
later, Kaspar told Lord Stanhope that he _had_ smelled the man:
however, he did not mention this at the time. To make a long story
short, on October 17, 1829, Kaspar did not come to midday eating, but
was found weltering in his gore, in the cellar of Daumer's house.
Being offered refreshment in a cup, he bit out a piece of the
porcelain and swallowed it. He had 'an inconsiderable wound' on the
forehead; to that extent the assassin had effected his purpose.
Feuerbach thinks that the murderer had made a shot at Kaspar's throat
with a razor, that Kaspar ducked cleverly, and got it on the brow, and
that the assassin believed his crime to be consummated, and fled,
after uttering words in which Kaspar recognised the voice of his
tutor, the possible albino. No albino or other suspicious character
was observed. Herr Daumer, before this cruel outrage, had remarked, in
Kaspar, 'a highly regrettable tendency to dissimulation and
untruthfulness,' and, just before the attack, had told the pupil that
he was a humbug. Lord Stanhope quoted a paper of Daumer's in the
_Universal Gazette_ of February 6, 1834 (_Allgemeine Zeitung_), in
which he says that 'lying and deceit were become to Kaspar a second
nature.' When did they begin to become a second nature? In any case
Daumer clove to the romantic theory of Kaspar's origin. Kaspar left
Daumer's house and stayed with various good people, being accompanied
by a policeman in his walks. He was sent to school, and Feuerbach
bitterly complains that he was compelled to study the Latin grammar,
'and finally even Cæsar's Commentaries!' Like other boys, Kaspar
protested that he 'did not see the use of Latin,' and indeed many of
our modern authors too obviously share Kaspar's indifference to the
dead languages. He laughed, in 1831, says Feuerbach, at the popish
superstition 'of his early attendants' (we only hear of one, and about
_his_ theological predilections we learn nothing), and he also laughed
at ghosts. In his new homes Kaspar lied terribly, was angry when
detected, and wounded himself--he said accidentally--with a pistol,
after being reproached for shirking the Commentaries of Julius Cæsar,
and for mendacity. He was very vain, very agreeable as long as no one
found fault with him, very lazy, and very sentimental.

In May 1831 Lord Stanhope, who, since the attack on Kaspar in 1829,
had been curious about him, came to Nuremberg, and 'took up' the hero,
with fantastic fondness. Though he recognised Kaspar's mythopoeic
tendencies, he believed him to be the victim of some nefarious
criminals, and offered a reward of 500 florins, anonymously, for
information. It never was claimed.

Already had arisen a new theory, that Kaspar was the son of an
Hungarian magnate. Later, Lord Stanhope averred, on oath, that
inquiries made in Hungary proved Kaspar to be an impostor. In 1830, a
man named Müller, who had been a Protestant preacher, and was now a
Catholic priest, denounced a preacher named Wirth, and a Miss Dalbonn,
a governess, as kidnappers of Kaspar from the family of a Countess,
living near Pesth. Müller was exposed, his motives were revealed, and
the newspapers told the story. Kaspar was therefore tried with
Hungarian words, and seemed to recognise some, especially Posonbya
(Pressburg). He thought that some one had said that his father was at
Pressburg: and thither Lord Stanhope sent him, with Lieutenant Hickel.
This was in 1831, but Kaspar recognised nothing: his companions,
however, found that he pretended to be asleep in the carriage, to hear
what was said about him. They ceased to speak of him, and Kaspar
ceased to slumber. A later expedition into Hungary, by Hickel, in
February 1832, on the strength of more Hungarian excitement on
Kaspar's part, discovered that there was nothing to discover, and
shook the credulity of Lord Stanhope. He could not believe Kaspar's
narrative, but still hoped that he had been terrorised into falsehood.
He could not believe both that the albino had never spoken to Kaspar
in his prison, and also that 'the man always taught me to do what I
was told.' To Lord Stanhope Kaspar averred that 'the man with whom he
had always lived said nothing to him till he was on his journey.' Yet,
during his imprisonment, the man had taught him, he declared, the
phrases which, by his account, were all the words that he knew when he
arrived at Nuremberg.

For these and other obvious reasons, Lord Stanhope, though he had
relieved Nuremberg of Kaspar (November 1831), and made ample provision
for him, was deeply sceptical about his narrative. The town of
Nuremberg had already tried to shift the load of Kaspar on to the
shoulders of the Bavarian Government. Lord Stanhope did not adopt him,
but undertook to pay for his maintenance, and left him, in January
1832, under the charge of a Dr. Meyer, at Anspach. He had a curator,
and a guardian, and escaped from the Commentaries of Julius Cæsar into
the genial society of Feuerbach. That jurist died in May 1833
(poisoned, say the Kasparites), a new guardian was appointed, and
Kaspar lived with Dr. Meyer. Finding him incurably untruthful, the
doctor ceased to provoke him by comments on his inaccuracies, and
Kaspar got a small clerkly place. With this he was much dissatisfied,
for he, like Feuerbach, had expected Lord Stanhope to take him to
England. Feuerbach, in the dedication to Lord Stanhope of his book
(1832), writes, 'Beyond the sea, in fair old England, you have
prepared for him a secure retreat, until the rising sun of Truth shall
have dispersed the darkness which still hangs over his mysterious
fate.' If Lord Stanhope ever made this promise, his growing scepticism
about Kaspar prevented him from fulfilling it. On December 9, 1833,
Meyer was much provoked by Kaspar's inveterate falseness, and said
that he did not know how to face Lord Stanhope, who was expected to
visit Anspach at Christmas. For some weeks Kaspar had been sulky, and
there had been questions about a journal which he was supposed to
keep, but would not show. He was now especially resentful. On two
earlier occasions, after a scene with his tutor, Kaspar had been
injured, once by the assassin who cut his forehead; once by a pistol
accident. On December 14, he rushed into Dr. Meyer's room, pointed to
his side, and led Meyer to a place distant about five hundred yards
from his house. So agitated was he that Meyer would go no further,
especially as Kaspar would answer no questions. On their return,
Kaspar said, 'Went Court Garden--Man--had a knife--gave a
bag--struck--I ran as I could--bag must lie there.' Kaspar was found
to have a narrow wound, 'two inches and a half under the centre of the
left breast,' clearly caused by a very sharp double-edged weapon. In
three or four days he died, the heart had been injured. He was able to
depose, but not on oath, that on the morning of the 14th a man in a
blouse (who had addressed him some days earlier) brought him a verbal
message from the Court gardener, asking him to come and view some clay
from a newly bored well, where, in fact, no work was being done at
this time. He found no one at the well, and went to the monument of
the rather forgotten poet Uz. Here a man came forward, gave him a
bag, stabbed him, and fled. Of the man he gave discrepant
descriptions. He became incoherent, and died.

There was snow lying, when Kaspar was stabbed, but there were no
footmarks near the well, and elsewhere, only one man's track was in
the Hofgarten. Was that track Kaspar's? We are not told. No knife was
found. Kaspar was left-handed, and Dr. Horlacher declared that the
blow must have been dealt by a left-handed man. Lord Stanhope
suggested that Kaspar himself had inflicted the wound by pressure, and
that, after he had squeezed the point of the knife through his wadded
coat, it had penetrated much deeper than he had intended, a very
probable hypothesis.

As for the bag which the assassin gave him, it was found, and Dr.
Meyer said that it was very like a bag which he had seen in Kaspar's
possession. It contained a note, folded, said Madame Meyer, as Kaspar
folded his own notes. The writing was in pencil, in _Spiegelschrift_,
that is, it had to be read in a mirror. Kaspar, on his deathbed, kept
muttering incoherences about 'what is written with lead, no one can
read.' The note contained vague phrases about coming from the Bavarian
frontier.

After Kaspar's death, the question of 'murder or suicide?' agitated
Germany, and gave birth to a long succession of pamphlets. A wild
woman, Countess Albersdorf ('_née_ Lady Graham,' says Miss Evans, who
later calls her 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf'), saw visions, dreamed
dreams, and published nonsense. Other pamphlets came out, directed
against the House of Baden. In 1870 an anonymous French pamphleteer
offered the Baden romance, as from the papers of a Major von
Hennenhofer, the villain in chief of the White Lady plot. Lord
Stanhope was named as the ringleader in the attacks on Kaspar, both at
Nuremberg and Anspach. In 1883 all the fables were revived in a
pamphlet produced at Ratisbon, a mere hash of the libels of 1834,
1839, 1840, and 1870. Dr. Meyer was especially attacked, his sons
defended his reputation by an action for libel on the dead, an action
which German law permits. There was no defence, and the publisher was
fined, and ordered to destroy all the copies. In 1892 the libels were
repeated, by 'Baron Alexander von Artin:' two documents of a palpably
fraudulent character were added, the rest was the old stuff. The
reader may find it in Miss Evans's _Kaspar Hauser_ (1892). For
example, Daumer knew a great deal. He even, in 1833, received an
anonymous letter from Anspach, containing the following statement:
'Lord Daniel Alban Durteal, advocate of the Royal Court in London,
said to me, "I am firmly convinced that Kaspar Hauser was murdered. It
was all done by bribery. Stanhope has no money, and lives by this
affair."' Daumer and Miss Evans appear to have seen nothing odd in
relying on an anonymous letter about Lord Daniel Alban Durteal!

Lord Stanhope, says Miss Evans, 'was known to have subsisted
principally upon the sale of his German hymnbook, and other
devotional works, for which he was a colporteur.' Weary of piety, Lord
Stanhope became a hired assassin. Perhaps this nonsense still has its
believers, seduced by 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf, _née_ Lady Graham,'
by Lord Daniel Alban Durteal, and by the spirit of Kaspar himself,
who, summoned by Daniel Dunglas Home, at a _séance_ with the Empress
Eugénie, apparently, announced himself as Prince of Baden. No
authority for this interesting ghost of one who disbelieved in ghosts
is given.

It is quite possible that Kaspar Hauser no more knew who he was than
the valet of 1669-1703 knew why he was a prisoner, no more than Mr.
Browne, when a dealer in 'notions,' knew that he was Mr. Bourne, a
dissenting preacher. Nothing is certain, except that Kaspar was an
hysterical humbug, whom people of sense suspected from the first, and
whom believers in animal magnetism and homoeopathy accepted as some
great one, educated by his Royal enemies in total darkness--to fit him
for the military profession.

It is difficult, of course, to account for the impossibility of
finding whence Kaspar had come to Nuremberg. But, in 1887, it proved
just as impossible to discover whither the Rev. Ansel Bourne had gone.
Mr. Bourne's lot was cast, not in the sleepy Royalist Bavaria of 1828,
but in the midst of the admired 'hustle' of the great Western
Republic. He was one of the most remarkable men in the country, not a
yokel of sixteen. He was last seen at his nephew's store, 121 Broad
Street, Providence, R.I., on January 17. On January 20, the hue and
cry arose in the able and energetic press of his State. Mr. Bourne, as
a travelling evangelist, was widely known, but, after a fortnight
unaccounted for, he arrived, as 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/18679