I find more love than them I trusted more.”
About this time, King Charles had a nephew sufficiently famous to make all his belongings noteworthy; and no account of famous dogs would be complete without some sketch of Prince Rupert’s white hound Boy. A beautiful lad this young prince must have been, as Vandyke has painted him, with Boy at his side. Always adventurous and daring, but with a dash and fire in his daring quite beyond the usual soldierly courage, he won something like adoration from his troopers. After a manhood of war, his last years were very quiet, and being of a scientific turn, he spent much time in experiments. The art of engraving owes him a large debt, and “Prince Rupert’s Drops,” still commemorate his name. And as to his character, whatever faults he might have, he was still, as one writer tells us, “so just, so beneficent, so courteous, that his memory remained dear to all who knew him. This I say of my own knowledge, having often heard old people in Berkshire speak in raptures of Prince Rupert.”
Many, indeed, are the stories told about this beautiful and daring boy, of his headlong courage, his warm heart, his kindness and pluck. Once he was out hunting, and the fox took to the earth. “A dog which the Prince loved, followed, but returning not, His Highnesse, being impatient, crept after, and took hold of his legs, which he could not draw out by reason of the narrowness of the hole, until Mr. Billingsby (the Prince’s tutor) took hold of His Highnesse’s heels; so he drew out the Prince, the Prince the dog, and the dog the fox.”
When a mere lad, Rupert was taken prisoner, and detained for nearly three years in the Castle of Lintz, on the Danube. Time hung heavy on his hands here, but part of it he whiled away with pets. He even succeeded in taming a hare, so that it would trot after him like a spaniel, and perform little tricks at his command.
PRINCE RUPERT WITH HIS WHITE DOG BOY.
(From the painting by Vandyke. )