Odd Bits of History: Being Short Chapters Intended to Fill Some Blanks

by Henry W. Wolff

At James's time Bar was still a rather considerable provincial capital, the chef-lieu of the largest bailliage in Lorraine. And in that little "West End" of the Haute Ville, where a cluster of Louis-Quatorze houses still stand in decayed grandeur, to recall past fashionableness, the nobility of the little Barrois, locally always a powerful and influential body—the Bassompierres, the Haraucourts, the Lenoncourts, the Stainvilles, the Romécourts—had their town houses, and there also dwelt the pick of the bureaucracy, all ready to pay their court to the Stuart "king," to whom even the French envoy reckoned it "an honour" to be introduced. The town had its own municipal government—at one time with its own clergé, noblesse, and tiers état; in James's day still with its syndic, to represent the Crown, its elected mayeur, Maître des Comptes, so many eschargeots, esvardeurs, gouverneurs de carrefours, and so on. It had a wall all round with no fewer than eleven gates. When James was there, Bar was famed throughout France and Lorraine for its peculiarly "elegant" poignées d'épée (sword-hilts) and other cutlery. Corneille tells us that the whole street of Entre Deux Ponts was full of cutlers' shops, and no visitor ever came to the place but he must carry off at least one sword-hilt as a keepsake. The town already manufactured its famous dragées and confitures, and pressed that same sour wine which "Murray" will have it—on what ground I know not—"resembles champagne," and which then was appreciated as a delicacy. The sanitary arrangements were not perfect. The Canal Urbain occasionally overflowed its banks and swamped the entire Rue des Tanneurs, in which the Pretender's house was situated. And, together with the rest of Bar and Lorraine, the town was still a little bit destitute after the havoc wrought by French and Swedes, Croats and Germans, Cravates (local brigands) and Champenois peasants, and all that "omnium bipedum sceleratissima colluvies," which had again and again overrun the duchy, robbing, burning, pillaging, violating, desecrating, torturing, exacting, and sucking the country dry to the very bone. Of all the world "only Jerusalem" had experienced worse horrors, so a pious Lorrain chronicler affirms. Oh, how the Lorrains of that day—and long after—hated and detested the French! When in November, 1714, those habitual invaders at length evacuated Nancy, the mob dressed up a straw figure in a French uniform, and led it forth amid jeers and execrations to an auto-da-fé. Even after annexation, a Nancy housewife declared herself most grossly "insulted" by a French officer, who simply explained the benefits which he thought that annexation must bring with it, and in anger she threw the friture, just frizzling in her pan, straight in his face.

Lorraine had been sadly afflicted indeed with long years of warfare. But in 1713 things were beginning to mend. Leopold, restored by the Treaty of Ryswick to his duchy—in which, as duke, his father had never set foot—had been on the throne getting on for sixteen years. And what with the excellent counsels of that best of Chancellors, Irish Earl Carlingford, and his own intuitive judgment and enlightened and paternal despotism, Lorraine was becoming populous and prosperous, happy and contented, once more. Leopold earned himself a name for a shrewd and prudent ruler. His brother-in-law, Philip of Orleans (the Regent), said of him, that of all rulers of Europe he did not know one who was his superior "en expérience, en sagesse, et en politique." And Voltaire has immortalised his virtues by saying: "Il est à souhaiter que la dernière postérité apprenne qu'un des plus petits souverains de l'Europe a été celui qui fit le plus de bien à son peuple." In fact, he was the very ruler whom Lorraine at that juncture wanted. Autocratic he was, and vain, and self-important, notwithstanding the homely bourgeoisie of his manner. But he knew exactly where the shoe pinched, and how to devise a remedy. He it was who first conceived the idea, which has helped to make France prosperous, of a wide network of canals. He it was, who, in 1724, set Europe an example, which at the time made him famous, of covering his country with a network of model roads. And though he again and again proposed, for the benefit of his own family, to "swap" poor little Lorraine—for the Milanais, for a bit of the Low Countries, or for other valuable possessions—while he was duke, he managed to make himself popular, and he was resolved to do his duty. "Je quitterais demain ma souveraineté si je ne pouvais faire du bien," so he said. Under his father, that brilliant general, Charles V., he had given proof of his pluck and prowess at Temeswar, of his military ability before Ebersburg. But in Lorraine, he knew, the one thing needful was peace. And with a dogged determination which was bound to overcome all difficulties, though the stars in their courses seemed to be fighting against him, that peace he managed to maintain, in the midst of a raging sea of war all round, which had drawn all neighbouring countries into its whirl. He did it—it is worth recording, because it materially affected James's position at his Court—by as adroit balancing between the two great belligerent Powers of the Continent as ever diplomatist managed to achieve. Born and bred in Austria, allied to the Imperial family by the closest ties of blood—his mother was an archduchess—trained in Austrian etiquette, an officer in the Austrian army, beholden to Austria for many past favours—and keenly alive to the fact that for any favours which might yet be to come he must look exclusively to the Court of Vienna—in his leanings and prepossessions he was entirely Austrian. But under his father and great-uncle history had taught his country the severe lesson, that without observing the best, though they be the most obsequious, relations towards France, at whose mercy the country lay, no Lorraine was possible. Accordingly, almost Leopold's very first act as Duke was to send M. de Couvange to Paris, to solicit on his behalf the hand of "Mademoiselle," the Princess of Orleans. Her hand was gladly accorded. There was a tradition—with a very obvious object—at Paris in favour of Lorrain marriages. This was the thirty-third, and there remained a thirty-fourth to conclude—the ill-starred marriage of Marie Antoinette. King James II. and his Queen attended the wedding at Fontainebleau, and Elizabeth Charlotte became one of the best of wives, and best and most popular of Lorraine duchesses, bearing her husband no less than fourteen children. Balancing between Austria and France, maintaining his private relations with the one, giving way in everything to the other, was Leopold's prudent maxim throughout his reign. So long as he adhered to that he felt himself safe. Whenever he departed from it, he found himself getting into mischief.

Leopold has been much abused by our writers and politicians, as if he had been a deliberate anti-English plotter and Jacobite accomplice. It is but fair to him to explain why he afforded our Pretender such liberal hospitality. The real fact is, that he could not help himself. He was bound to. France demanded it, and he could not refuse—nor yet refuse to make his hospitality generous and lavish. There was the additional attraction, indeed, of a show of importance, of a little implication in diplomatic negotiations and playing a part in European high politics, which to Leopold must have been strongly seductive. A good deal is also said about religious motives, the suggestion of which must have helped Leopold equally with the Curia and the Imperial Court, with both of whom he was anxious to stand well. The Pope—it is true, under pressure from James—subsequently thanked Leopold in a special brief, "ample et bien exprimé," for the proof of attachment which he had rendered to the Church by his reception of the English Pretender, the emblem to all Europe of the Church of Rome under persecution. Leopold was an exceptionally devout Roman Catholic. He heard mass religiously every day, spent an hour in prayer after dinner, and "adored the Sacrament" every evening. He had revived Charles III.'s stringent provisions against Protestants, interdicting all public worship and, in theory at any rate, declaring Protestantism a crime deserving of hanging. In his excessive zeal he would not even allow the Cistercian monks of Beaupré to retain in their service a Protestant shepherd, though they pleaded hard that he was the best shepherd whom they had ever had. So zealous a believer was of course a man after the very heart of the widow and son of that "fort bon homme," as Archbishop Le Tellier scoffingly termed James II., who had "sacrificed three kingdoms for a mass." To himself, on the other hand, it seemed something of a sacred act to open his house to the "Woman persecuted by the dragon." However, all this was but as dust in the balance by the side of the compelling necessity of French dictation, doubly compelling at that particular period. For Leopold had of late been playing his own little game. Things had gone against France in the field, and he had put his money on the other horse. He was always after a fashion a gambling and speculative ruler, willing to stake almost his very existence on the roulette of high politics. At that moment he was flattering himself with hopes that the Congress of Utrecht would do something for him. Both Austria and England had privately promised—at least some of their statesmen had—that he was to have a seat at the Congress table. That would add immensely to his dignity and prestige. Then he was to have a slice of the Low Countries. To ensure this result, he was "casting his bread upon the waters" with a vengeance—spending money wholesale, bribing English, and Dutch, and Austrian statesmen with the most profuse generosity—more particularly Marlborough, in whom he appears to have retained a belief throughout, who most faithlessly "sold" him, and who cost him a fortune. At the very time here spoken of our great general had been favoured with a fresh mark of favour from Leopold—a magnificent carosse, horsed with six splendid dapple-greys (Leopold was a great horse-fancier), hung with most costly trappings. All this—which proved in the event to have been entirely thrown away—very naturally gave umbrage to France. And Louis XIV. had not missed his opportunity of letting Leopold know that a score was being marked up against him at Versailles. France had never stood on much ceremony with Lorraine, from Henry II. downward. Louis XIV., more particularly, had done his best to equal his grandfather's notorious and most capricious hostility. In 1702, in the teeth of international law and of Leopold's protests, as well as Elizabeth Charlotte's prayers, he had marched his troops into Lorraine. They were still there, indeed, in larger numbers than before. When 1709 brought its "grand hiver"—still remembered as a time of grievous tribulation—when the crops froze in the fields, the vines in the vineyards, the children in the nursery, the sacramental wine in the chalice, the water by the fire, when Dearth and Famine once more laid their grim hand upon all Lorraine—Louis XIV. had given Leopold a little additional cut with his tyrant's whip, seizing some of the provisions providently laid up for the relief of his subjects, and appropriating them to the use of his own armies, which moreover, he reinforced by a fresh contingent of 20,000 men, sent with orders to live "à discrétion." Louis was quite ready to do something of the same sort again. Therefore, when Louis said: Receive James, Leopold had no choice but to receive him. His letters and despatches make this perfectly clear. There is a good deal of talk about the Pretender's "estimable qualities," how the Duke and Duchess admire him, how happy they are that he has not gone to Aix-la-Chapelle. And no doubt the two managed to be for a time excellent friends. But every now and then, through all this polite buncombe, out comes the frank admission that all is done "to please the king." And we know how promptly and unhesitatingly Leopold's hospitality was withdrawn, once French pressure ceased, in 1716. To ourselves, by receiving an exiled Pretender into his neutral realm, as we have received many such, Leopold never dreamt that he was giving cause for legitimate umbrage. No one could be more surprised than he seems to have been when our Parliament took up the matter as a grievance.

And, to be fair, he never appears to have afforded to James the slightest encouragement for a forcible assertion of his claims. His counsel was all the other way. It was the French, it was the Pretender's own followers at home, it was Roman Cardinal Gualterio, who countenanced, and occasionally urged, warlike measures. Cardinal Gualterio, more in particular, prodded the Catholic prince very vigorously, in the interest of his Church, arguing that "il falloit hazarder quelque chose et meme affronter le sort, ce qui ne se fait pas sans risque." Leopold, on the other hand, was all dissuasion. He wanted James to keep near England, in order to be handy in the event of his being recalled—which he seems to have thought a likely contingency. When James began to talk of armaments and invasions, Leopold dwelt upon the difficulties, the all-but-hopelessness of such a move. When, in June, 1714, shortly before Queen Anne's death, James wrote from Plombières, that he must go into England, since he learnt that his rival, the Electoral Prince of Hanover, had gone there, Leopold, who was admirably informed from Hanover, through his brother, the Elector-Archbishop of Trèves, sent a message back post-haste with the trustworthy tidings that George was neither gone nor going. The reasons which led George's father to forbid his visit read a little strange at the present day. In the first place, there was that Hanoverian economy—which, it is true, was ostensibly disclaimed. In the second, the Prince was not to be received in England as heir-presumptive—so that he would not really better his chances by going. Moreover, the Elector, "connoissant l'humeur brusque et fort emportée de son fils, apprehendoit beaucoup qu'il ne se rendit odieux aux anglais." Lastly, and mainly, he was afraid of dropping between two stools, if he were to stake his son's chances too decidedly on the English succession. It was quite on the cards, he thought, that "par un effet des resolutions que l'inconstance de la nation y a rendues si ordinaire," the British nation would chasser its next sovereign as it had chassé its last-but-one. And then, where would his son be? For if his son went to England, it was much to be feared that his brother, who had been not quite rightfully excluded from the succession, might make good his claim to Hanover. And there would George be, out in the cold! So his father was resolved to play a waiting game.

The first difficulty which James found himself confronted with, and which Leopold had to overcome for him—for French good offices were obviously out of the question—was the procuring of a passport. Such credential was at the time indispensable, for Europe was swarming with bad characters. Besides, there was nominally war still; and public roads and even walled towns were altogether insecure. In the Foreign Office papers we come across correspondence relating to the robbing of the public coach running between Strassburg and Paris, at Benameny, in Lorrain territory, by Palatine soldiers, who had come over from Caub. And even in carefully locked and watched Bar-le-Duc, Leopold advises King Louis that, with "a fourth company of his regiment of guards" added to the local force, besides twenty-five chevaux-legers and twenty-five gardes-du-corps to act as escort, he can answer for the Pretender's safety only against attacking parties of not more than fifty or a hundred at the outside, which, he says, ought to be borne in mind, "si armées se mettoient en campagne." Queen Mary only expresses what everyone felt when she says that it is to be apprehended "que quelque méchant en se servissent de l'occasion pour faire un méchant coup." She accordingly begs the "commnoté" of Chaillot to pray for "the king's" safety.

In 1714 the Emperor, who was the principal sovereign to be petitioned, would not make out a passport for James, to enable him to move into Germany—though professedly willing to give the Stuart his niece in marriage, and avowedly not a little put out with England, but yet desirous of avoiding offence to King George. In 1713 he raised no difficulty. Indeed, at Leopold's instance he was obliging enough to supplement his passport with a special letter of commendation very kindly worded. And he carefully avoided treading on corns either way by not naming James in the document—for all of which Leopold takes great credit. But it appears that plenty more potentates besides the Emperor had to be solicited. And the two Electors, of Hanover and of Brandenburg, were obdurate in their refusal—in agreement for once. It was a ticklish matter; for without their safe-conduct James could scarcely be counted secure. On the other hand, if their safe-conducts were to be waited for, the Emperor would of a surety take offence, as if his own passport were judged insufficient. Leopold, being great on etiquette, took the last-named to be the more serious danger, and advised running the risk—more particularly since he had been advised by his envoy in London, Baron Förstner, that Queen Anne had privately granted what amounted to a passport to her brother for going into Lorraine. That was taken to settle the matter, and James put himself en route.

It was on the 22d of February, 1713, that he reached Bar, closely guarded and travelling incognito, on which account an official reception in Bar was dispensed with, though the French artillery at Toul had fired a salute. The council were under strict injunctions to omit nothing which might conduce to their visitor's safety, or minister to his comfort, or that was conventionally due to a crowned head. Accordingly, we find them in their next sitting, on the 25th February, passing a whole string of votes and resolutions having reference to his arrival and his safety in the town. The police and chasse-coquins are forthwith put on the alert, sentries are placed at all corners, and, to accommodate them, a whole number of new sentry-boxes are put up. The authorities are directed to question every stranger coming into the town carefully, and, if there should appear to be anything suspicious about any one, rigorously to detain him and report the case at once by express courier to Lunéville. Iron grilles are put up. All the postern-gates are walled up, so is one of the principal entrances, and so is—in spite of sanitary considerations—a main sewer passing through the wall. Soldiers were a good deal less squeamish in those days than they are now, and sewers had served for many a surprise in the Thirty Years' War. The remaining ten gates are to be carefully watched, and never opened before 5 A.M., nor left open after 8 P.M. Billets are issued for the overflow of James's suite, which appears to have been numerous, and stable-room is bespoken for his horses. James evidently was an inconvenient visitor to house. For he would have all his large apparatus of Court and Household close to him—chamberlains, kitchen, kennel, and all. Mrs Strickland praises his habitual economy. His doings in Lorraine do not bear out that praise. From the Nairne MSS. in the British Museum (which give a full list) we know that in 1709 and 1710 his household comprised above 120 persons, from the secretaries down to the grooms' helper, drawing salaries of from 12 to 675 livres per mensem. There was the Comptroller, Mr. Bous, who retailed the anecdotes of the Court to Lady Middleton; a clerk of the green cloth, a yeoman baker, a yeoman confectioner, a yeoman of the chaundry, Jeremiah Browne, "Esq.," master-cook, a water-carrier, and a scourer. There were yeomen's scullery assistants, confessors and chaplains, a doctor, a "chyrurgien," and an apothecary, a "rideing purveyor," and a "chaiseman," "Lady Maclane, laundress," pursuivants, and necessary women—all that belongs to a royal household. And the whole establishment cost "19,412 lstrs. per mensem." All these people did not go to Bar, but a good many did. And there were a crowd more, for whom the town had to provide. For we read in the Macpherson Papers that all "Peacock's family"—i.e., all Protestant refugees who had been at "Stanley," i.e., at St. Germains—had followed the Chevalier to Bar. There was not one of them left. So writes the Queen. And the Duke states, quite independently of this, that the Pretender is surrounded with Protestant exiles. Altogether James's Court ran up a goodly bill, which it was disappointing to the town afterwards to find that, though incurred by express order of the Duke, the burgesses were expected to meet out of their own funds. To enable them to do so, Leopold allowed the council to appropriate the deniers of the octroi to their involuntary hospitality.

The more or less Protestant colouring given to the refugee establishment was scarcely palatable to the very orthodox population of Bar. But James was playing, not to the Bar pit, but to the English gallery. "Downs or Leslie should at once go there," so we find O'Rourke writing to Middleton early in 1713. Leslie did go soon after, and the Chevalier, as his advocates take credit, prevailed upon the Duke to relax his rigid rule in one instance, and allow Protestant service in an upper room in James's house. That was in the "Rue Nève." The upper room, which, we read, was just over James's own apartment, cannot have been large. So it is to be feared that the service was not over well attended. But it was enough to save appearances, and to give the Jacobites of England a shadow of reason for declaring, as they did, that James really was a Protestant. James himself spoke a very different language. "He would rather abandon all than act against his conscience and his honour." He protested over and over again that "all the crowns in the world would not make him change his religion."

Thanks to King Louis's perpetual ordering and countermanding, when James got to Bar, the château was once more as bare and uninhabitable as ever it had been, and for a few days the Pretender had to be content with the same rather humble house which he was destined subsequently to occupy for a considerable time, in the "Rue des Tanneurs"—Number 22, Rue Nève, it is now—a plain, square, three-storeyed building (counting the upper range of rooms, which is very low, as a storey). This is described as at the time "the principal house" in the town, the property of one of the most distinguished residents, Councillor of State M. Marchal. It has eight windows frontage, facing severally the Rue Nève and the Rue des Pressoirs, and abutting width-ways on the very narrow passage Rue St. Antoine. A few days later, however, we find the Pretender safely established in the château, and there on the 9th of March he receives the Duke of Lorraine and his brother François, Abbé of Stavelot, with an amount of circumstance and scrupulous weighing of precedences which is described with rather amusing minuteness in the 'Gazette de France.' Not to hurt James's feelings—to whom royal honours could not be openly shown, out of consideration for Queen Anne—Leopold ordered that he himself should not be received with the usual ceremonial, troops under arms, and councillors presenting addresses. But the Lorrains were a devotedly loyal population. They would not be forbidden. The whole population of the town and of all the surrounding district crowded into the streets, to receive the ruler of the land with shouts of welcome. James, being the resident, played the host at Bar. There was, a dinner, a supper, and a long private talk in the château, with the result, we read, that the two princes at once became fast friends. James, we know, though wanting in most of the qualities which are regarded as specifically manly, was a good-looking and agreeable fellow enough. As for Leopold, with his experience of Courts, and his kind and considerate disposition, he could not very well prove otherwise than a pleasant companion and a kind patron. We have plenty of portraits of him left, limned both with pen and with brush. Short and stumpy, round-bellied, red-faced, with a free allowance of pimples, and, moreover, with those abnormally stout legs which remained his most striking outward characteristic to his dying day, he must have looked a veritable Jacques Bonhomme put into a full-bottomed wig and court-dress. There is a tale to those legs. Leopold came into the world about two months before his time, very sickly and very delicate. More particularly his legs were very spindles. Under a special treatment designed to remedy this defect, they grew just as much too big as previously they had been too thin. Terrible stickler for etiquette that Leopold was, and intent upon lavish display, when occasion seemed to demand it, both himself and his wife were simplicity itself when such occasion was withdrawn. They could talk to a peasant in the peasant's brogue about his ouïettes and his hemp. One of the princesses thought nothing of accepting a lift home in a market-cart, and, as the driver commendingly related, showed herself "bien sage." "Cousine," said the Duchess to the Duchess of Elbœuf, "restez chez nous, nous avons un bon gigot." This simplicity and familiarity with humble ways as a matter of course made the Duke and Duchess popular. But what helped them more than anything to gain their people's hearts was their remarkable readiness to enter into all those local fêtes which long custom had sanctioned as common to both high and low. The French occupation had made a long break in the observance of those fêtes. How should the Lorrains "sing songs" in what had become to them practically "a strange land?" For something like thirty years their harps remained hung up upon the willow-trees. Great, however, was the joy when at the first Fête de la Veille des Rois—kept in commemoration of the brilliant victory achieved over Charles the Bold in 1476—and at the Brandons or Faschinottes,[3] following that fête, the Duke and Duchess appeared in person among the merry-makers, entering most good-humouredly and, indeed, jovially into all their doings. Of the many local customs which Lorraine boasts, the Brandons was at that time still the particular favourite. It had been handed down from hoary antiquity. Every couple married since the last Brandons was expected to join. The husband had to provide himself with a faggot or log of wood, and carry it in procession through the town, accompanied by his wife, along a roundabout route prescribed by custom, to the Duke's palace, march three times past the Duke's window, and then deposit the piece of fuel on a huge pyramidal pyre built up in the ducal courtyard. Some couples went on foot, others rode on horseback. All were dressed in their best, and the procession must have looked exceedingly picturesque. Every lady was expected to wear some little ornament—generally made of silver—specially devised to indicate either her calling or her station in life: a coronet, or a sickle, or whatever it might be. The streets were lined with people, who freely expended their wit—a pretty ready one—in chaff pointed at the new victims to matrimony, who in their turn were expected to put on a most dejected look, as if seriously repenting the allegiance rashly entered into to Hymen. In the evening the pyre was lighted, and round this huge bonfire people made mildly merry with gambols and dances. Tables were spread, at the Duke's cost, richly laden with viands and native wine. In 1698, at the first revival of the Brandons after a long pause, the file of matrimonial victims was, of course, quite exceptionally long. It was a delightful surprise to the crowd to see at its head the Duke and Duchess themselves, newly married as they were—the Duchess, being slightly enceinte with her first-born, wearing at her girdle a little silver cradle. That was not all. In the evening Leopold mixed freely with the revellers, stopped at table after table, drank here and drank there, proposing a toast or responding to one,—with the result that the people went half-mad with enthusiasm. Not a tumbler had the Duke drunk out of, which was not religiously treasured as a relic. And long after the French had forced their yoke firmly home upon the shrinking neck of unwilling Lorraine, those tumblers were still shown to growing children as memorials of the "good old time." At the carnival, which followed the Brandons, Leopold and Elizabeth Charlotte were again to the fore. They did not mind figuring in public—even sometimes on an amateur stage. Leopold once appeared masked as Sultan—his consort, not quite appropriately, as an Odalisk; but the loyal Lorrains saw nothing incongruous in that dress.

The striking difference very apparent in the characters severally of host and guest in our little chapter of history, may have helped to draw them together all the more closely. James was in his ordinary mood anything but mirthful. References to him are frequent in the correspondence as being "terribly sad," or else "very pensive, which is his ordinary humour," "très sérieux et reservé," so much so that "rien ne l'auoit pû tirer de la profonde melancolie ou il étoit," and so on. Yet he could be merry, too, and more in particular he loved a dance. At one ball, given in the Palace at Lunéville, we read that he managed particularly to ingratiate himself with the ladies who were past their first bloom, by an act of undoubted chivalry. They wanted badly to dance, but dared not, while the Duchess was sitting. And the Duchess considered herself too much of a matron to foot it with the young ones. James, however, made her. He would take no refusal. The dead room became reanimated once more, and many an aging heart in its night-thoughts blessed the gallant prétendant. James, we are told, was a prominent figure in the Nancy Brandons and Carnival, kept with peculiar éclat in 1715, after a fresh break of thirteen years, due to French occupation. Court chroniclers seem to consider that the presence of "Le Roi d'Angleterre" added peculiar lustre to that performance.