Rupert Prince Palatine Part 1

Rupert Prince Palatine.

by Eva Scott.

PREFACE

It is curious that in these days of historical research so little has been written about Rupert of the Rhine, a man whose personality was striking, whose career was full of exciting adventure, and for whose biography an immense amount of material is available.

His name is known to most people in connection with the English Civil War, many have met with him in the pages of fiction, some imagine him to have been the inventor of mezzotint engraving, and a few know that he was Admiral of England under Charles II. But very few indeed could tell who he was, and where and how he lived, before and after the Civil War.

The present work is an attempt to sketch the character and career of this remarkable man; the history of the Civil War, except so far as it concerns the Prince, forming no part of its scope. Nevertheless, the study of Prince Rupert's personal career throws valuable side-lights on the history of the war, and especially upon the internal dissensions which tore the Royalist party to pieces and were a princ.i.p.al cause of its ultimate collapse. From Rupert's adventures and correspondence we also learn much concerning the life of the exiled Stuarts during the years of the Commonwealth; while his post-Restoration history is closely connected with the Naval Affairs of England.

The number of ma.n.u.scripts and other doc.u.ments which bear record of Rupert's life is enormous. Chief amongst them are the Domestic State Papers, preserved in the Public Record Office; the Clarendon State Papers, and the Carte Papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Lansdowne Ma.n.u.scripts in the British Museum, and the Rupert {vi} Correspondence, which originally comprised some thousands of letters and other papers collected by the Prince's secretary. The collection has now been broken up and sold; but the Transcripts of Mr. Firth of Balliol College, Oxford, were made before the collection was divided, and comprise the whole ma.s.s of correspondence. For the loan of these Transcripts, and for much valuable advice I am deeply indebted to Mr.

Firth. I also wish to acknowledge the kind a.s.sistance of Mr. Ha.s.sall of Christchurch, Oxford.

Some of the Rupert Papers were published by Warburton, fifty years ago, in a work now necessarily somewhat out of date. But there is printed entire the log kept in the Prince's own ship, 1650-1653, which is here quoted in chapters 13 and 14; also in Warburton are to be found the letters addressed by the Prince to Colonel William Legge, 1644-1645.

The Bromley Letters, published 1787, relate chiefly to Rupert's early life, and to the years of exile, 1650-1660. The Carte Papers are invaluable for the history of the Civil War, and of Rupert's transactions with the fleet, 1648-50; and in the Thurloe and Clarendon State Papers much is to be found relating to the wanderings of Rupert and the Stuarts on the Continent.

With regard to the Prince's family relations, German authorities are fullest and best. Chief among these are the letters of the Elector Charles Louis, and the letters and memoirs of Sophie, Electress of Hanover, all published from the Preussischen Staats-Archieven; also the letters of the Elector's daughter, the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, published from the same source. Besides these, Hausser's "Geschichte der Rheinischen Pfalz", and Reiger's "Ausgeloschte Simmerischen Linie" are very useful.

Mention of the Prince is also found in the ma.s.s of Civil War Pamphlets preserved in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, and in contemporary memoirs, letters and diaries, on the description of which there is not s.p.a.ce to enter here.

CHAPTER I

THE PALATINE FAMILY

"A man that hath had his hands very deep in the blood of many innocent people in England," was Cromwell's concise description of Rupert of the Rhine.[1]

"That diabolical Cavalier" and "that ravenous vulture" were the flattering t.i.tles bestowed upon him by other soldiers of the Parliament.[2] "The Prince that was so gallant and so generous," wrote an Irish Royalist.[3] And said Cardinal Mazarin, "He is one of the best and most generous princes that I have ever known."[4]

Rupert was not, in short, a person who could be regarded with indifference. By those with whom he came in contact he was either adored or execrated, and it is remarkable that a man who made so strong an impression upon his contemporaries should have left so slight a one upon posterity. To most people he is a name and nothing more;--a being akin to those iron men who sprang from Jason's dragon teeth, coming into life at the outbreak of the English Civil War to disappear with equal suddenness at its close. He is regarded, on the one hand, as a blood-thirsty, plundering ruffian, who endeavoured to teach in England lessons of cruelty learnt in the Thirty Years' War; {2} on the other, as a mere headstrong boy who ruined, by his indiscretion, a cause for which he exposed himself with reckless courage. Neither of these views does him justice, and his true character, his real influence on English history are lost in a cloud of mist and prejudice. His character had in it elements of greatness, but was so full of contradictions as to puzzle even the astute Lord Clarendon, who, after a long study of the Prince, was reduced to the exclamation--"The man is a strange creature!"[5] And strange Rupert undoubtedly was! Born with strong pa.s.sions, endowed with physical strength, and gifted with talents beyond those of ordinary men, but placed too early in a position of great trial and immense responsibility, his history, romantic and interesting throughout, is the history of a failure.

In his portraits, of which a great number are in existence, the story may be read. We see him first a st.u.r.dy, round-eyed child, looking out upon the world with a valiant wonder. A few years later the face is grown thinner and sadder, full of thought and a gentle wistfulness, as though he had found the world too hard for his understanding. At sixteen he is still thoughtful, but less wistful,--a gallant, handsome boy with a graceful bearing and a bright intelligent face, just touched with the melancholy peculiar to the Stuart race. At five-and-twenty his mouth had hardened and his face grown stern, under a burden which he was too young to bear. After that comes a lapse of many years till we find him embittered, worn, and sad; a man who has seen his hopes destroyed and his well-meant efforts perish. Lastly, we have the Rupert of the Restoration; no longer sick at heart and desperately sad, but a Rupert who has out-lived hope and joy, disappointment and sorrow; a handsome man, with a keen intellectual face, but old before his time, and made hard and cold and contemptuous by suffering and loneliness.

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The first few months of Rupert's existence were the most prosperous of his life, but he was not a year old before his troubles began. His father, Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, had been married at sixteen to the famous Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England; the match was not a brilliant one for the Princess Royal of England, but it was exceedingly popular with the English people, who regarded Frederick with favour as the leader of the Calvinist Princes of the Empire. Elizabeth was no older than her husband, and seems to have been considerably more foolish. Her extravagancies and Frederick's difficult humours were the despair of their patient and faithful household steward; yet for some years they dwelt at Heidelberg in peaceful prosperity, and there three children were born to them, Frederick Henry, Charles Louis, and Elizabeth.

But the Empire, though outwardly at peace, was inwardly seething with religious dissension, which broke out into open war on the election of Ferdinand of Styria, (the cousin and destined successor of the Emperor,) as King of Bohemia. Ferdinand was a staunch Roman Catholic, the friend and pupil of the Jesuits, with a reputation for intolerance even greater than he deserved.[6] As a matter of fact Protestantism was abhorrent to him, less as heresy, than as the root of moral and political disorder. The Church of Rome was, in his eyes, the fount of order and justice, and he was strongly imbued with the idea, then prevalent in the Empire, that to princes belonged the settlement of religion in those countries over which they ruled.

But it happened that the Protestants of Bohemia had, at that moment, the upper hand. The turbulent n.o.bles of the country were bent on establishing at once their political and religious independence; they rose in revolt, threw the Emperor's ministers out of the Council Chamber window at Prague, and rejected Ferdinand as king.

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The Lutheran Princes looked on the revolt coldly, feeling no sympathy with Bohemia. They believed as firmly as did Ferdinand himself in the right of secular princes to settle theological disputes. They were loyal Imperialists, and hated Calvinism, anarchy and war, far more than they hated Roman Catholicism.

With the Calvinist princes of the south, at the head of whom stood the Elector Palatine and the Landgrave of Hesse Ca.s.sel, the case was different. Fear of their Catholic neighbours, Bavaria and the Franconian bishoprics, made them war-like; they sympathised strongly with their Bohemian co-religionists, they longed to break the power of the Emperor, and were even willing to call in foreign aid to effect their purpose. Schemes for their own personal aggrandis.e.m.e.nt played an equal part with their religious enthusiasm, and their plots and intrigues gave Ferdinand a very fair excuse for his unfavourable view of Protestantism.

For a time they merely talked, and on the death of Matthias they acquiesced in the election of Ferdinand as Emperor: but only a few days later Frederick was invited by the Bohemians to come and fill their vacant throne.

Frederick was not ambitious; left to himself he might have declined the proffered honour, but, urged by his wife and other relations, he accepted it, and departed with Elizabeth and their eldest son, to Prague, where he was crowned amidst great rejoicings.

Among the Protestant princes, three, and three only, approved of Frederick's action; these were Christian of Anhalt, the Margrave of Ans.p.a.ch and the Margrave of Baden. Maurice of Hesse-Ca.s.sel, on the contrary, though a Calvinist and an enemy of the Imperial House, strongly condemned the usurpation as grossly immoral; and in truth the only excuse that can be offered for it is Frederick's belief in a Divine call to succour his co-religionists. Unfortunately he was the last man to succeed in so difficult an enterprise; yet for a brief period all went well, and at Prague, November {5} 28th, 1619, in the hour of his parents' triumph, was born the Elector's third son--Rupert.

The Bohemians welcomed the baby with enthusiasm; the ladies of the country presented him with a cradle of ivory, embossed with gold, and studded with precious stones, and his whole outfit was probably the most costly that he ever possessed in his life. He was christened Rupert, after the only one of the Electors Palatine who had attained the Imperial crown. His sponsors were Bethlem Gabor, King of Hungary, whose creed approximated more closely to Mahommedanism than to any other faith; the Duke of Wurtemberg, and the States of Bohemia, Silesia, and Upper and Lower Lusatia. The baptism was at once the occasion of a great feast, and of a political gathering; it aggravated the already smouldering wrath of the Imperialists; a revolt in Prague followed, and within a year the Austrian army had swept over Bohemia, driving forth the luckless King and Queen.

Frederick had no allies, he found no sympathy among his fellow-princes, on the selfish n.o.bility and the apathetic peasantry of Bohemia he could place no reliance; resistance in the face of the Emperor's forces was hopeless;--the Palatines fled.

In the hasty flight the poor baby was forgotten; dropped by a terrified nurse, he was left lying upon the floor until the Baron d'Hona, chancing to find him, threw him into the last coach as it left the courtyard. The jolting of the coach tossed the child into the boot, and there he would have perished had not his screams attracted the notice of some of the train, who rescued him, and carried him off to Brandenburg after his mother.

Elizabeth had sought shelter in Brandenburg because the Elector of that country had married Frederick's sister Catharine. But George William of Brandenburg was a Lutheran, and a prudent personage, who had no wish to embroil himself with his Emperor for a cause of which he thoroughly {6} disapproved. He gave his sister-in-law a cold reception, but, seeing her dire necessity, lent her his castle of Custrin, where, on January 11th, 1621, she gave birth to a fourth son. Damp, bare and comfortless was the castle in which this child first saw the light, and mournful was the welcome he had from his mother. "Call him Maurice,"

she said, "because he will have to be a soldier!" So Maurice the boy was named, after the warlike Prince of Orange, the most celebrated general of that day.[7]

To the Prince of Orange the exiles now turned their thoughts. Return to their happy home in the Palatinate was impossible, for Frederick lay under the ban of the Empire, and his hereditary dominions were forfeited in consequence of his rebellious conduct; therefore when, six weeks after the birth of her child, George William informed Elizabeth that he dared no longer shelter her, she entrusted the infant to the care of the Electress Catharine, and taking with her the little Rupert, began her journey towards Holland.

Maurice, Prince of Orange and Stadtholder of Holland, was the eldest son of William the Silent, and brother of Frederick's mother, the Electress Juliana. He had strongly urged his nephew's acceptance of the Bohemian crown, and it seemed but natural that he should afford an asylum to those whom he had so disastrously advised. He did not shrink from his responsibility, and the welcome which he accorded to his hapless nephew and niece was as warm as that of the Elector of Brandenburg had been cold. At Munster they were met by six companies of men at arms, sent to escort them to Emerich, where they met their eldest son, Henry, who had been sent to the protection of Count Ernest of Na.s.sau at the beginning of the troubles; there also gathered round them the remnants of their shattered court, and it was with a shadowy show of royalty that they proceeded to the Hague.

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Nothing could have exceeded the kindness of their reception, princes and people being equally anxious to show them sympathy. Prince Henry Frederick of Orange, the brother and heir of the Stadtholder, resigned his own palace to their use, and the States of Holland presented Elizabeth with a mansion that stood next door to the palace. The furniture necessary to make this house habitable, Elizabeth was enforced to borrow from the ever generous Prince Henry. For all the necessaries of life the exiles were dependent upon charity, and, but for the generosity of the Orange Princes, supplemented by grants of money from England and from the States of Holland, they would have fared badly indeed.

Thenceforth Elizabeth dwelt at the Hague, while the Thirty Years' War, of which her husband's action had lit the spark, raged over Germany.

Slowly and reluctantly a few of the Protestant Princes took up arms against the Emperor. James I sent armies of Amba.s.sadors both to Spain and Austria, and offered settlements to which Frederick would not, or could not agree, but he lent little further aid to his distressed daughter. He regarded his son-in-law's action as a political crime, which had produced the religious war that he had striven all his life to avoid, therefore, though he tacitly permitted English volunteers to enlist under Frederick's mercenary, Count Mansfeld, he would not countenance the war openly. Indeed he deprecated it as the chief obstacle to the marriage of Prince Charles with the Spanish Infanta, on which he had set his heart. The English Parliament, on the contrary, detested the idea of a Spanish alliance, and eagerly advocated a war on behalf of the Protestant exiles.

But if her father would not fight on her behalf Elizabeth had friends who asked nothing better. For her sake Duke Christian of Brunswick, the lay-Bishop of Halberstadt, threw himself pa.s.sionately into the war.

He and Mansfeld having completed between them the alienation of the other Princes, {8} by their lawless plunderings, were defeated by the Imperialist General, Tilly. The Emperor settled the Upper Palatinate on his brother-in-law, the Duke of Bavaria, and, though the Lower Palatinate clung tenaciously to its Elector, Frederick was never able to return thither, until, many years later, the intervention of the quixotic King of Sweden won him a brief and evanescent success.

Thus in trouble, anxiety and poverty pa.s.sed the early youth of the Palatine children. In the first years of the exile only Henry and Rupert shared their parents' home at the Hague; Charles and Elizabeth had been left in the care of their grandmother Juliana, who, when Heidelberg became no longer a safe place of residence, carried them off to Berlin, where Maurice had been left with his aunt.

Henry was old enough to feel the separation from his brother and sister, to whom he was much attached. "I trust you omit not to pray diligently, as I do, day and night, that it may please G.o.d to restore us to happiness and to each other," he wrote with precocious seriousness to Charles, "I have a bow and arrow, with a beautiful quiver, tipped with silver, which I would fain send you, but I fear it may fall into the enemy's hands."[8] In another letter he tells Charles that "Rupert is here, blythe and well, safe and sound," that he is beginning to talk, and that his first words were "Praise the Lord", spoken in Bohemian.[9] In the following year, 1621, Rupert was very ill with a severe cold, and Henry wrote to his grandfather, King James:--"Sir, we are come from Sewneden to see the King and Queen, and my little brother Rupert, who is now a little sick. But my brother Charles is, G.o.d be thanked, very well, and my sister Elizabeth, and she is a little bigger and stronger than he."[10] A quaint mixture of childishness and precocity is noticeable in all his letters. "I have two {9} horses alive, that can go up my stairs; a black horse and a brown horse!" he informed his grandfather on another occasion.[11]

Frederick, an affectionate father to all his children, was especially devoted to his eldest son, whom he made his constant companion. Of Rupert also we find occasional mention in his letters. "The little Rupert is very learned to understand so many languages!"[12] he says in 1622, when the child was not three years old. In another letter, dated some years later, he writes to his wife: "I am very glad that Rupert is in your good graces, and that Charles behaves so well. Certes, they are doubly dear to me for it."[13]

But the Queen, so universally beloved and belauded, does not appear to have been a very affectionate mother. A devoted wife she unquestionably was, but she did not exert herself to win her children's love. "Any stranger would be deceived in that humour, since towards them there is nothing but mildness and complaisance,"[14] wrote her son Charles in after years; and, though Charles himself had little right so to reproach her, there was doubtless some truth in the saying. She had not been long at the Hague before she obtained from the kindly Stadtholder the grant of a house at Leyden, "where," says her youngest daughter, Sophie, "her Majesty had her whole family brought up apart from herself, greatly preferring the sight of her monkeys and dogs to that of her children."[15]

Having thus successfully disposed of her family, Elizabeth was able to live at the Hague with considerable satisfaction, surrounded by the beloved monkeys and dogs, of which she had about seventeen in all. Nor was she without congenial society. At the Court of Orange there were {10} no ladies, for both the Princes were unmarried; but very speedily a court gathered itself about the lively Queen of Bohemia. English ladies flocked to the Hague to show their respect and sympathy for their dear Princess. n.o.bles and diplomates, more especially Sir Thomas Roe and Sir Dudley Carleton, the last of whom was English Amba.s.sador at the Hague, vied with one another in evincing their friendship for the Queen; and hundreds of adventurous young gentlemen came to offer their swords to her husband and their hearts to herself. "I am never dest.i.tute of a fool to laugh at, when one goes another comes,"[16]

wrote Elizabeth, _a propos_ of these eager volunteers, who had dubbed her the "Queen of Hearts."

Soon after they were settled at Leyden, Henry and Rupert were joined by the sister and brothers. .h.i.therto left at Berlin, and their society was further augmented by other children, born at the Hague, and despatched to Leyden as soon as they were old enough to bear the three days'

journey thither. To the youngest sister, Sophie, we owe a detailed description of their daily life. "We had," she wrote, "a court quite in the German style; our hours as well as our curtsies were all laid down by rule." Eleven o'clock was the dinner hour, and the meal was attended with great ceremony. "On entering the dining-room I found all my brothers drawn up in front, with their gentlemen and governors posted behind in the same order, side by side. I was obliged to make a very low curtsey to the Princes, a slighter one to the others, another low one on placing myself opposite to them, then another slight one to my governess, who on entering the room with her daughters curtsied very low to me. I was obliged to curtsey again on handing my gloves over to their custody, then again on placing myself opposite to my brothers, {11} again when the gentlemen brought me a large basin in which to wash my hands, again after grace was said, and for the ninth, and last time, on seating myself at table. Everything was so arranged that we knew on each day of the week what we were to eat, as is the case in convents.

On Sundays and Wednesdays two divines or two professors were always invited to dine with us."[17]

All the children, both boys and girls, were very carefully instructed in theology, according to the doctrine of Calvin, and, observed the candid Sophie, "knew the Heidelberg Catechism by heart, without understanding one word of it."[18] According to the curriculum arranged for them, the boys enjoyed four hours daily of leisure and exercise. They had to attend morning and evening prayers read in English; the morning prayer was followed by a Bible reading, and an application of the lesson. They were instructed also in the terrible Heidelberg Catechism, in the history of the Reformers, and in religious controversy. On Sundays and feastdays they had to attend church, and to give an abstract of the sermon afterwards. They learnt besides, mathematics, history, and jurisprudence, and studied languages to so much purpose that they could speak five or six with equal ease.[19] To their English mother they invariably wrote and spoke in English, but French was the tongue they used by preference, and amongst themselves; a curious French, often interpolated with Dutch and German phrases.