Famous Affinities of History Part 9

The duke tried to reply, but his utterance was very thick.

"No quarter!" he was believed to say.

The officer objected and begged that such an order as that should be given in writing. The duke rolled over and seized a sheaf of playing-cards. Pulling one out, he scrawled the necessary order, and that was taken to the commanders in the field.

The Highlanders could not stand the cannon fire, and the English won. Then the fury of the common soldiery broke loose upon the country.

There was a reign of fantastic and fiendish brutality. One provost of the town was violently kicked for a mild remonstrance about the destruction of the Episcopalian meeting-house; another was condemned to clean out dirty stables. Men and women were whipped and tortured on slight suspicion or to extract information. c.u.mberland frankly professed his contempt and hatred of the people among whom he found himself, but he savagely punished robberies committed by private soldiers for their own profit.

"Mild measures will not do," he wrote to Newcastle.

When leaving the North in July, he said:

"All the good we have done is but a little blood-letting, which has only weakened the madness, but not at all cured it; and I tremble to fear that this vile spot may still be the ruin of this island and of our family."

Such was the famous battle of Culloden, fought in 1746, and putting a final end to the hopes of all the Stuarts. As to c.u.mberland's order for "No quarter," if any apology can be made for such brutality, it must be found in the fact that the Highland chiefs had on their side agreed to spare no captured enemy.

The battle has also left a name commonly given to the nine of diamonds, which is called "the curse of Scotland," because it is said that on that card c.u.mberland wrote his bloodthirsty order.

Such, in brief, was the story of Prince Charlie's gallant attempt to restore the kingdom of his ancestors. Even when defeated, he would not at once leave Scotland. A French squadron appeared off the coast near Edinburgh. It had been sent to bring him troops and a large supply of money, but he turned his back upon it and made his way into the Highlands on foot, closely pursued by English soldiers and Lowland spies.

This part of his career is in reality the most romantic of all. He was hunted closely, almost as by hounds. For weeks he had only such sleep as he could s.n.a.t.c.h during short periods of safety, and there were times when his pursuers came within an inch of capturing him. But never in his life were his spirits so high.

It was a sort of life that he had never seen before, climbing the mighty rocks, and listening to the thunder of the cataracts, among which he often slept, with only one faithful follower to guard him. The story of his escape is almost incredible, but he laughed and drank and rolled upon the gra.s.s when he was free from care. He hobn.o.bbed with the most suspicious-looking caterans, with whom he drank the smoky brew of the North, and lived as he might on fish and onions and bacon and wild fowl, with an appet.i.te such as he had never known at the luxurious court of Versailles or St.-Germain.

After the battle of Culloden the prince would have been captured had not a Scottish girl named Flora Macdonald met him, caused him to be dressed in the clothes of her waiting-maid, and thus got him off to the Isle of Skye.

There for a time it was impossible to follow him; and there the two lived almost alone together. Such a proximity could not fail to stir the romantic feeling of one who was both a youth and a prince. On the other hand, no thought of love-making seems to have entered Flora's mind. If, however, we read Campbell's narrative very closely we can see that Prince Charles made every advance consistent with a delicate remembrance of her s.e.x and services.

It seems to have been his thought that if she cared for him, then the two might well love; and he gave her every chance to show him favor. The youth of twenty-five and the girl of twenty-four roamed together in the long, tufted gra.s.s or lay in the sunshine and looked out over the sea. The prince would rest his head in her lap, and she would tumble his golden hair with her slender fingers and sometimes clip off tresses which she preserved to give to friends of hers as love-locks. But to the last he was either too high or too low for her, according to her own modest thought. He was a royal prince, the heir to a throne, or else he was a boy with whom she might play quite fancy-free. A lover he could not be-so pure and beautiful was her thought of him.

These were perhaps the most delightful days of all his life, as they were a beautiful memory in hers. In time he returned to France and resumed his place amid the intrigues that surrounded that other Stuart prince who styled himself James III., and still kept up the appearance of a king in exile. As he watched the artifice and the plotting of these make-believe courtiers he may well have thought of his innocent companion of the Highland wilds.

As for Flora, she was arrested and imprisoned for five months on English vessels of war. After her release she was married, in 1750; and she and her husband sailed for the American colonies just before the Revolution. In that war Macdonald became a British officer and served against his adopted countrymen. Perhaps because of this reason Flora returned alone to Scotland, where she died at the age of sixty-eight.

The royal prince who would have given her his easy love lived a life of far less dignity in the years that followed his return to France. There was no more hope of recovering the English throne. For him there were left only the idle and licentious diversions of such a court as that in which his father lived.

At the death of James III., even this court was disintegrated, and Prince Charles led a roving life under the t.i.tle of Earl of Albany. In his wanderings he met Louise Marie, the daughter of a German prince, Gustavus Adolphus of s...o...b..rg. She was only nineteen years of age when she first felt the fascination that he still possessed; but it was an unhappy marriage for the girl when she discovered that her husband was a confirmed drunkard.

Not long after, in fact, she found her life with him so utterly intolerable that she persuaded the Pope to allow her a formal separation. The pontiff intrusted her to her husband's brother, Cardinal York, who placed her in a convent and presently removed her to his own residence in Rome.

Here begins another romance. She was often visited by Vittorio Alfieri, the great Italian poet and dramatist. Alfieri was a man of wealth. In early years he divided his time into alternate periods during which he either studied hard in civil and canonical law, or was a constant attendant upon the race-course, or rushed aimlessly all over Europe without any object except to wear out the post-horses which he used in relays over hundreds of miles of road. His life, indeed, was eccentric almost to insanity; but when he had met the beautiful and lonely Countess of Albany there came over him a striking change. She influenced him for all that was good, and he used to say that he owed her all that was best in his dramatic works.

Sixteen years after her marriage her royal husband died, a worn-out, bloated wreck of one who had been as a youth a model of knightliness and manhood. During his final years he had fallen to utter dest.i.tution, and there was either a touch of half contempt or a feeling of remote kinship in the act of George III., who bestowed upon the prince an annual pension of four thousand pounds. It showed most plainly that England was now consolidated under Hanoverian rule.

When Cardinal York died, in 1807, there was no Stuart left in the male line; and the countess was the last to bear the royal Scottish name of Albany.

After the prince's death his widow is said to have been married to Alfieri, and for the rest of her life she lived in Florence, though Alfieri died nearly twenty-one years before her.

Here we have seen a part of the romance which attaches itself to the name of Stuart-in the chivalrous young prince, leading his Highlanders against the bayonets of the British, lolling idly among the Hebrides, or fallen, at the last, to be a drunkard and the husband of an unwilling consort, who in her turn loved a famous poet. But it is this Stuart, after all, of whom we think when we hear the bagpipes skirling "Over the Water to Charlie" or "Wha'll be King but Charlie?"

END OF VOLUME ONE

THE EMPRESS CATHARINE AND PRINCE POTEMKIN

It has often been said that the greatest Frenchman who ever lived was in reality an Italian. It might with equal truth be a.s.serted that the greatest Russian woman who ever lived was in reality a German. But the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Catharine II. resemble each other in something else. Napoleon, though Italian in blood and lineage, made himself so French in sympathy and understanding as to be able to play upon the imagination of all France as a great musician plays upon a splendid instrument, with absolute sureness of touch and an ability to extract from it every one of its varied harmonies. So the Empress Catharine of Russia-perhaps the greatest woman who ever ruled a nation-though born of German parents, became Russian to the core and made herself the embodiment of Russian feeling and Russian aspiration.

At the middle of the eighteenth century Russia was governed by the Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. In her own time, and for a long while afterward, her real capacity was obscured by her apparent indolence, her fondness for display, and her seeming vacillation; but now a very high place is accorded her in the history of Russian rulers. She softened the brutality that had reigned supreme in Russia. She patronized the arts. Her armies twice defeated Frederick the Great and raided his capital, Berlin. Had Elizabeth lived, she would probably have crushed him.

In her early years this imperial woman had been betrothed to Louis XV. of France, but the match was broken off. Subsequently she entered into a morganatic marriage and bore a son who, of course, could not be her heir. In 1742, therefore, she looked about for a suitable successor, and chose her nephew, Prince Peter of Holstein-Gottorp.

Peter, then a mere youth of seventeen, was delighted with so splendid a future, and came at once to St. Petersburg. The empress next sought for a girl who might marry the young prince and thus become the future Czarina. She thought first of Frederick the Great's sister; but Frederick shrank from this alliance, though it would have been of much advantage to him. He loved his sister-indeed, she was one of the few persons for whom he ever really cared. So he declined the offer and suggested instead the young Princess Sophia of the tiny duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.

The reason for Frederick's refusal was his knowledge of the semi-barbarous conditions that prevailed at the Russian court.

The Russian capital, at that time, was a bizarre, half-civilized, half-oriental place, where, among the very highest-born, a thin veneer of French elegance covered every form of brutality and savagery and l.u.s.t. It is not surprising, therefore, that Frederick the Great was unwilling to have his sister plunged into such a life.

But when the Empress Elizabeth asked the Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst to marry the heir to the Russian throne the young girl willingly accepted, the more so as her mother practically commanded it. This mother of hers was a grim, harsh German woman who had reared her daughter in the strictest fashion, depriving her of all pleasure with a truly puritanical severity. In the case of a different sort of girl this training would have crushed her spirit; but the Princess Sophia, though gentle and refined in manner, had a power of endurance which was toughened and strengthened by the discipline she underwent.

And so in 1744, when she was but sixteen years of age, she was taken by her mother to St. Petersburg. There she renounced the Lutheran faith and was received into the Greek Church, changing her name to Catharine. Soon after, with great magnificence, she was married to Prince Peter, and from that moment began a career which was to make her the most powerful woman in the world.

At this time a lady of the Russian court wrote down a description of Catharine's appearance. She was fair-haired, with dark-blue eyes; and her face, though never beautiful, was made piquant and striking by the fact that her brows were very dark in contrast with her golden hair. Her complexion was not clear, yet her look was a very pleasing one. She had a certain diffidence of manner at first; but later she bore herself with such instinctive dignity as to make her seem majestic, though in fact she was beneath the middle size. At the time of her marriage her figure was slight and graceful; only in after years did she become stout. Altogether, she came to St. Petersburg an attractive, pure-minded German maiden, with a character well disciplined, and possessing reserves of power which had not yet been drawn upon.

Frederick the Great's forebodings, which had led him to withhold his sister's hand, were almost immediately justified in the case of Catharine. Her Russian husband revealed to her a mode of life which must have tried her very soul. This youth was only seventeen-a mere boy in age, and yet a full-grown man in the rank luxuriance of his vices. Moreover, he had eccentricities which sometimes verged upon insanity. Too young to be admitted to the councils of his imperial aunt, he occupied his time in ways that were either ridiculous or vile.

Next to the sleeping-room of his wife he kept a set of kennels, with a number of dogs, which he spent hours in drilling as if they had been soldiers. He had a troop of rats which he also drilled. It was his delight to summon a court martial of his dogs to try the rats for various military offenses, and then to have the culprits executed, leaving their bleeding carca.s.ses upon the floor. At any hour of the day or night Catharine, hidden in her chamber, could hear the yapping of the curs, the squeak of rats, and the word of command given by her half-idiot husband.

When wearied of this diversion Peter would summon a troop of favorites, both men and women, and with them he would drink deep of beer and vodka, since from his early childhood he had been both a drunkard and a debauchee. The whoops and howls and vile songs of his creatures could be heard by Catharine; and sometimes he would stagger into her rooms, accompanied by his drunken minions. With a sort of psychopathic perversity he would insist on giving Catharine the most minute and repulsive narratives of his amours, until she shrank from him with horror at his depravity and came to loathe the sight of his bloated face, with its little, twinkling, porcine eyes, his upturned nose and distended nostrils, and his loose-hung, lascivious mouth. She was scarcely less repelled when a wholly different mood would seize upon him and he would declare himself her slave, attending her at court functions in the garb of a servant and professing an unbounded devotion for his bride.

Catharine's early training and her womanly nature led her for a long time to submit to the caprices of her husband. In his saner moments she would plead with him and strive to interest him in something better than his dogs and rats and venal mistresses; but Peter was incorrigible. Though he had moments of sense and even of good feeling, these never lasted, and after them he would plunge headlong into the most frantic excesses that his half-crazed imagination could devise.

It is not strange that in course of time Catharine's strong good sense showed her that she could do nothing with this creature. She therefore gradually became estranged from him and set herself to the task of doing those things which Peter was incapable of carrying out.

She saw that ever since the first awakening of Russia under Peter the Great none of its rulers had been genuinely Russian, but had tried to force upon the Russian people various forms of western civilization which were alien to the national spirit. Peter the Great had striven to make his people Dutch. Elizabeth had tried to make them French. Catharine, with a sure instinct, resolved that they should remain Russian, borrowing what they needed from other peoples, but stirred always by the Slavic spirit and swayed by a patriotism that was their own. To this end she set herself to become Russian. She acquired the Russian language patiently and accurately. She adopted the Russian costume, appearing, except on state occasions, in a simple gown of green, covering her fair hair, however, with a cap powdered with diamonds. Furthermore, she made friends of such native Russians as were gifted with talent, winning their favor, and, through them, the favor of the common people.

It would have been strange, however, had Catharine, the woman, escaped the tainting influences that surrounded her on every side. The infidelities of Peter gradually made her feel that she owed him nothing as his wife. Among the n.o.bles there were men whose force of character and of mind attracted her inevitably. Chast.i.ty was a thing of which the average Russian had no conception; and therefore it is not strange that Catharine, with her intense and sensitive nature, should have turned to some of these for the love which she had sought in vain from the half imbecile to whom she had been married.

Much has been written of this side of her earlier and later life; yet, though it is impossible to deny that she had favorites, one should judge very gently the conduct of a girl so young and thrust into a life whence all the virtues seemed to be excluded. She bore several children before her thirtieth year, and it is very certain that a grave doubt exists as to their paternity. Among the n.o.bles of the court were two whose courage and virility specially attracted her. The one with whom her name has been most often coupled was Gregory Orloff. He and his brother, Alexis Orloff, were Russians of the older type-powerful in frame, suave in manner except when roused, yet with a tigerish ferocity slumbering underneath. Their power fascinated Catharine, and it was currently declared that Gregory Orloff was her lover.

When she was in her thirty-second year her husband was proclaimed Czar, after the death of the Empress Elizabeth. At first in some ways his elevation seemed to sober him; but this period of sanity, like those which had come to him before, lasted only a few weeks. Historians have given him much credit for two great reforms that are connected with his name; and yet the manner in which they were actually brought about is rather ludicrous. He had shut himself up with his favorite revelers, and had remained for several days drinking and carousing until he scarcely knew enough to speak. At this moment a young officer named Gudovitch, who was really loyal to the newly created Czar, burst into the banquet-hall, booted and spurred and his eyes aflame with indignation. Standing before Peter, his voice rang out with the tone of a battle trumpet, so that the sounds of revelry were hushed.

"Peter Feodorovitch," he cried, "do you prefer these swine to those who really wish to serve you? Is it in this way that you imitate the glories of your ancestor, that ill.u.s.trious Peter whom you have sworn to take as your model? It will not be long before your people's love will be changed to hatred. Rise up, my Czar! Shake off this lethargy and sloth. Prove that you are worthy of the faith which I and others have given you so loyally!"

With these words Gudovitch thrust into Peter's trembling hand two proclamations, one abolishing the secret bureau of police, which had become an instrument of tyrannous oppression, and the other restoring to the n.o.bility many rights of which they had been deprived.