University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.

King Richard II.

It has been a day of storm and darkness—the
morning dawned upon the mustering of the elements—vast
towering clouds rose mass upon
mass, stratum above stratum, till the whole horizon
was over-canopied. Then there was a stern
and breathless pause, as if the tempest-demon
were collecting his energies in silent resolution;

anon its own internal weight appeared to rend the
vaporous shroud asunder, and the big rain poured
down in torrents. At moments, indeed, the sunbeams
have struggled through the driving rack,
and darted down their pensiles of soft light, showing
even more blithely golden than their wont,
from the very contrast of the surrounding gloom.
Still—noon arrived, and there was no cessation of
the strife. At that hour, the blue lightning was
splitting the tortured clouds in twain, and the
thunder roaring and crashing close above our
heads. The melancholy wailing of the winds
among the sculptured pinnacles and ivyed turrets
of our Elizabethan mansion—the sobbing and
creaking of the immemorial oak-trees, their huge
branches wrestling with the gale—the dashing and
pattering of the heavy rain—and, deeper and more
melancholy than all, the gradually increasing moan
of the distant river, have conspired all day long to
cast a gloom alike upon the face of nature and the
heart of man. Yet now evening has brought back
peace, and calm delicious sunshine.

I sit beside my open casement, and the fresh
odour of the drenched herbage rises refreshingly
to my senses—the west is clear and beautifully
blue—the broad sun sinking slowly below the
horizon, cloudless, indeed, but veiled in that soft

haze, which enables me to gaze upon his glories
with undazzled delight. Towards the east the
heavy clouds are rolling away, their edges
touched so sweetly by the last rays of the declining
day-god that it is hardly possible to conceive
them—as they seemed a few short hours ago
—the harbingers of desolation and dismay. The
very rain-drops sparkle like diamonds on every
blade of grass, on every leaf of those old oaks,
which smile as tranquilly in the glow of this soft
evening as though they had never borne and shuddered
beneath the weight of the tempest—there is a
mute voice of rejoicing breathed up from all around
me—thousands of summer flies are on the wing—
the rooks are wheeling on their balanced pinions
high up in the breezeless air—the deer have come
forth from the tangled coverts wherein they
cowered during the tempest, and are grazing in
picturesque groups in all directions—the clustered
woodbines, twining over every coigne and buttress,
smell wooingly—it is an evening of fragrant loveliness.

Such has been the picture of my own career.
My youth and manhood have been spent in domestic
feuds and foreign warfare, in banishment,
hardship, bloodshed, sorrow—my declining years
are flowing away in peace, tranquillity, and happiness.

I know not how it is, nor wherefore, but
my thoughts have been cast backward towards the
eventful past more strongly during this morning
than at any previous period in the course of many
years.

I have lived in a singular and most important
age; an age which will, I believe, hereafter
date as an era—which will be a precedent for
future centuries—the seed of a harvest that shall
be reaped hereafter. In almost every region
of the earth there have been strange commotions—a
new spirit seems to have gone forth
among the people—a thinking, questioning, resisting
spirit. I have seen a king—a mild and, in the
main, a well-intentioned king—dragged down from
the throne of his ancestors—haled, like the vilest
of criminals, to the ignominious scaffold, for the
mere upholding of that dignity, and asserting that
prerogative, which, a hundred years ago, a man
would have been considered frantic to have called
in question. I have seen the people triumph by
the mere force of popular opinion, and by the
steadiness of their united efforts, over the bravest,
the wealthiest, the most enlightened aristocracy of
the universe. I have seen liberty degenerate into
license; and despotism—as it has at some time
done in every age and every country—spring up,

the very consequence of that same license. I
have seen a puissant people break all the bonds of
civil and political society, with the avowed intention
of shaking off an oppressive government. I
have seen them plunge into the maddest anarchy,
till, sickened and wearied out with the abuse of
that very freedom for which they had so greatly
done and suffered, they have themselves called
forth an iron despot from their own peculiar ranks
—have erected over themselves a power ten thousand
times more absolute—ten thousand times
more galling, than that which they had previously
cast down. I have seen a man—a man of the
people—of the despised and trampled people—set
himself upon a par with the mightiest potentates
of his age. I have seen a usurper raise my native
country to a situation, to a pre-eminence
among the nations of the world, such as she never
occupied before, no, not in the days of the greatest
of her legitimate sovereigns. I have seen his unassisted
wisdom defeat the deep diplomacy of the
most crafty statesmen; I have seen the navies of
Spain and Holland humbled before his all-victorious
banner. I have seen monarchs courting
the alliance of one who was, a few brief years before,
a by-word and a laughing-stock to our bold
cavaliers. All this have I seen, and more—all
this have I seen in my own native England; and
though I strove against the elevation of that wondrous
being with the whole energies of my mind
and body; though I was an exile from the land of
my fathers during the plenitude of his power;
though I have subsequently seen the restoration of
the ancient dynasty, and with it have recovered
my patrimonial possessions—I faithfully confess
my own conviction that Cromwell was—ay! and
will be considered—the mightiest of usurpers, and
the most wise of conquerors. I believe that his
enlightened policy will be resumed hereafter; I
believe that the harvest he has sowed will be
reaped and garnered by our sons, and our sons'
sons; I believe that the spirit which he has set
afloat will go on increasing from hour to hour—
will go on working, whether for good or for evil I
know not, for centuries yet to come; I believe that
it will give brith to revolutions such as our fathers
have never dreamed of, such as ourselves have
never witnessed; I believe, even now, that convulsions
are at hand, greater in their result than those
in which it has been my lot to play no humble part,
and which shall themselves but pave the way for
greater that shall follow; I believe that the ages
of legitimacy have already passed from earth;
and when I look upon the madness, the baseness,
the loathsome sensuality, the frantic ingratitude of
present rulers, I could almost rejoice in the belief—
did I not foresee the wreck of many a noble institution—did
I not foresee the fall of much that is
venerable, much that is in itself good—did I not foresee
that the march will be still onward—onward—
till reform shall have degenerated into revolution—
till the pruning away of excrescences shall have
led to the uprooting of the tree—till the mania for
freedom shall have become a mania for change—
and that of change for abolition. I look upon the
present peace, the present gleam of national repose
and welfare, but as a brief precarious truce, originating
from the mere necessity of taking breath.
We have already witnessed how the triumph of
the popular faction, and the establishment of a self-styled
republic in Britain, gave birth to the assertion
of equal rights, to popular excitement, and to
civil war in the neighbouring realm of France;
and though, for a time, the flame of popular spirit
hath in this country, as it were, burnt itself out,
and so perished for the lack of sustenance—while
on the other side of the Channel it hath been
extinguished by the still powerful hand of the
nobility—I yet believe that the suppression hath
been but for the moment; and that it will again
burst forth with a broad and all-pervading radiance.

It is my firm conviction that the order of things
which has been, never will be again!—that the
events which in my youth were hourly taking
place as familiar things, not only never will take
place again, but, in the lapse of a single century,
will be either utterly forgotten, or, if recorded, be
looked upon as wild and extravagant, almost as
impossible fictions. It is this conviction which has
now determined me to revise some papers, on
which I stumbled accidentally, as it were, this
morning; relating to events which—while they
have been altogether the most important of my
own life—possess so much of what even now, in
the comparatively settled state of affairs throughout
the world, appears wild and marvellous, that
I cannot but feel certain, that to remote posterity
they will bear the semblance of things wholly out
of the course of society, and may, therefore, if
preserved, convey to them much information, and
some entertainment.

The events in my own life, to which I have
already alluded, are so intimately connected with
the history of France during the period at which
they occurred, and the account of them seems to
me to furnish so admirable a commentary on the
state of things as they then were, that I have determined,
before giving them to the public—which

it is my intention to do precisely as the journal in
which they are imbodied was written at the time—
to preface them by a slight sketch of the situation
of that country in which alone they could have
happened. It will be of course borne in mind that
the triumph of free principles in England—although
it had ended in the elevation of a despot to the
throne—had, nevertheless, been in itself complete;
and although the powers that were in France had
looked on for the most part in apathy, or, perhaps,
in sympathy with the misfortunes of Charles, there
can be no manner of doubt but the people received
encouragement to make an effort for the establishment
of such a constitution as might preserve to
them the liberties to which they now for the first
time began to consider themselves entitled. The
weakness of the hands in which government was
vested; the debility of the aristocracy, which,
during the long reign of Louis XIII., had been
humbled to the very dust by the iron policy of
Richelieu; their want of union among themselves,
which prevented the possibility of their either
rallying in a mass to the defence of the throne, or
of their successfully resisting the attacks designed
against their own body; the youth and consequent
long minority of the king; the infatuation of the
queen-regent, Anne of Austria, for the feeble yet
crafty successor of the stern Richelieu; the poverty
of the country; the exhaustion of the treasury,
through the constantly recurring expenses
of the Spanish War; the heavy taxes levied, now
on the office-holders, now on the people at large;
and, above all, the bitter hatred which was almost
universally entertained against Mazarin, operating
more than all the rest to divide and distract parties
—all conspired to render the moment in the highest
degree favourable to an attempt which would probably
have taken place long before, had it not been
that the preceding minister had been no less ready
to defend than willing to execute to the utmost his
despotic powers—that his talents were inferior
only to his ambition, and his ambition—when his
passions or his fears were once fairly excited—to
his cruelty.

The immediate cause of the popular outbreak,
which in our days received its denomination of the
Fronde—from the mimic warfare of children about
the streets, who would occasionally resist the
police sent to disperse them with slings and
stones—was the attempt to impose a tax upon all
the sovereign courts of judicature throughout the
realm, the Parliament alone excepted. These
bodies, composed of the most distinguished jurists of
the day, at once passed the celebrated Edict of

Union; under which, all those who hated the cardinal,
whether from public disaffection or from
private pique, from self-interest or patriotic feelings,
banded themselves at once. After many
fruitless negotiations between the court and the
Parliament, which only served to render the intriguing
parties more desperately hostile to each
other, both parties took up arms nearly simultaneously:
a bourgeois guard was organized; the
streets of Paris were barricaded; the Archbishop
coadjutor of Paris De Retz raised a large force of
cavalry at his own private expense; and the armies
thus levied were intrusted at once to the command
of some score of exceedingly clever, but no less
profligate, nobles, who had, moreover, no feelings
in common with the mass of their party, save
hatred to Mazarin—a passion which was always
ready to give place to aught that might further
their own self-advancement. The Dukes of Elbeuf
and Beaufort, Monsieur de Bouillon, and the celebrated
Rochefoucault were on the instant openly
and actively engaged on the popular side; while
Turenne was more than suspected of an intention to
bring up the army—with which he had first foiled,
and then defeated, the brave De Merci on the Rhine
—to the aid of the Frondeurs. On the other side, the
Prince de Condé and the Duke of Orleans were
appointed leaders; multitudes of the young and
profligate noblesse, who, during the administration
of Mazarin's predecessor, had been excluded from
all power of intriguing for or against the government,
rushed forward with all that mad levity
which constituted the national character of France.
To this it was that I attribute the success of the
court faction: the people, doubtful of their own
power—sufficient, by-the-way, to overturn a
stronger government than that of Mazarin—
united the nobles to their cause, who fought
for them, as they intrigued for themselves, vigorously
enough, till some new caprice, some fresh
amour, or some hope of advancement, caused them
to desert their party, and go over at once by scores
at a time to the opposite faction. This levity, this
utter want of principle, this vacillation of purpose
among the leaders—not one of whom, by-the-way,
is free from the charge of repeated acts of treachery
to his party—tended not only to weaken the popular
party, but finally to render the bourgeoisy,
with whom the spirit of rebellion in the first place
originated, so weary of a war by which they
speedily found that they were gaining nothing,
while they were suffering extremities, that they
finally suffered it to cease, as it were, by common
consent of all engaged. For aught I know, it is the
only rebellion which ever extinguished itself, which
died of exhaustion, unsuppressed by its political
antagonists, and unpunished, when all was over,
by its political conquerors.

This tergiversation it is, also, that will hereafter
tend to render the annals of the Fronde a mass of
inextricable confusion; and which can hardly fail
to place obstacles of the greatest weight in the
way of future historians. There is no one prominent
character among the principal actors—Molè,
the president of the Parliament, alone excepted—
who did not repeatedly turn sides, as interest or
humour prompted him; and the slightest pretext
was held cause enough for defection from the
banners of either faction! The promise of favours
from a vain and capricious beauty; the
hope of a higher station—of the government of a
petty town, or of the command of a regiment;
the most trivial disgust at any others of his
party, were enough to overturn all scruples of
honour, consistency, or principle, even in the
bosoms of such men as Hocquincourt, Turenne,
and Condé. Historians, for the most part, err in
attributing great popular movements, great political
results, to individual leaders, overlooking entirely
the will and action of the great masses, on
which, in truth, the conduct and bias of the leaders

must generally depend. In this strange rebellion
the people were in earnest—the leaders in sport:
the people were striving for liberty, from an ardent
thirst for freedom in the abstract, from a desire to
ameliorate their present condition, and to establish
government on sound and popular principles; the
leaders were striving, as I have said before, in very
levity of heart, from the mere desire of action and
momentary importance, or at best from the lust of
personal aggrandizement. To this, then, I ascribe
the fact that the people were overthrown; and to
this I am willing to assign, by anticipation, the failure
of all those who shall hereafter strive to reconcile
the strange confusion of this wild rebellion to
any of the ordinary standards of principles and
actions, causes and effects.

Since my restoration to my own country--from
which I was a weary exile for many a long year,
fighting, like my betters, for my own hand, and
perhaps also from a mistaken predilection for the
royalist party, which had been not a little strengthened
by the unfortunate termination of our English
civil wars, and by the mad abuses there consequent
upon the triumph of the populace--since
my restoration to my own country, I have heard
actual spectators of the commotions of the Fronde

term it[1] “a rebellion unennobled by the spirit of
liberty;” and actually turn it into a jest, as a trivial
senseless uproar, excited by men of ambition and
women of light character, begun in levity, and
prosecuted to satiety. I, on the contrary, feel
certain that I can see in its blind and undigested
movements the working of a spirit which will
one day shake the world; which will place it beyond
the power of ministers or princes to sway
public opinion like a wind-waved reed; which is
even now working onward, in my own country,
towards a mighty revolution, provoked by the insanity
of the monarchs who, taking no lesson from
the fate of their fathers, are rushing headlong to
their own destruction; and which will one day,
unless I err more wildly than I can easily believe,
pervade the whole of Europe. But enough has
been said already to give a slight clew to the
reader of the following pages, by which he may
find his way through the mazes of this almost
forgotten period.

The ensuing chapters were written immediately

after the occurrence of the events to which they
relate—many of them almost contemporaneously.
The only judgment I can form of the influence
they may exercise on the minds of others, is from
that which they possess on my own. From having
perused them this morning—distant as is their
date, and widely as I feel my own character to
have been changed in the interim—I have returned,
as it were, to the very days of my prime—
the actors are before my eyes—I can hear their
voices—I can read their countenances. It is for
this reason that I am unwilling to change a word,
even for the improvement of the style: much of
the language is even now becoming antiquated;
and, ere mysons shall be of age to read them, will
probably be obsolete. There is, nevertheless, a
life in its very roughness, which I am loath to
alter, fearing lest, by over-polishing the blade, I may
wear away a something of its sterling metal: as
it is, I commit it to the hands of posterity; only reminding
those who may perchance take it up to
kill a heavy hour, that the writer was one in his
day more ready with the sword than the pen, and
that to him the camp and the court-martial stood
in the lieu of schools or académe.

Moncton Hall, Feb. 23, A. D. 1683.