Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3

by Isaac Disraeli

The singing of this lark in favour of the Duke of Anjou is not so evident as the cunning trick of the other French agent, the political Bishop of Valence, who now reaped the full advantage of his 1500 copies over the thirty-two of his rivals. Every one had the French one in hand, or read it to his friends; while the others, in manuscript, were confined to a very narrow circle.

The period from the 10th of April to the 6th of May, when they proceeded to the election, proved to be an interval of infinite perplexities, troubles, and activity; it is probable that the secret history of this period of the negotiations was never written. The other ambassadors were for protracting the election, perceiving the French interest prevalent: but delay would not serve the purpose of Montluc, he not being so well provided with friends and means on the spot as the others were. The public opinion which he had succeeded in creating, by some unforeseen circumstance might change.

During this interval, the bishop had to put several agents of the other parties hors de combat. He got rid of a formidable adversary in the Cardinal Commendon, an agent of the pope’s, whom he proved ought not to be present at the election, and the cardinal was ordered to take his departure. A bullying colonel was set upon the French negotiator, and went about from tent to tent with a list of the debts of the Duke of Anjou, to show that the nation could expect nothing profitable from a ruined spendthrift. The page of a Polish count flew to Montluc for protection, entreating permission to accompany the bishop on his return to Paris. The servants of the count pursued the page; but this young gentleman had so insinuated himself into the favour of the bishop, that he was suffered to remain. The next day the page desired Montluc would grant him the full liberty of his religion, being an evangelical, that he might communicate this to his friends, and thus fix them to the French party. Montluc was too penetrating for this young political agent, whom he discovered to be a spy, and the pursuit of his fellows to have been a farce; he sent the page back to his master, the evangelical count, observing that such tricks were too gross to be played on one who had managed affairs in all the courts of Europe before he came into Poland.

Another alarm was raised by a letter from the grand vizier of Selim the Second, addressed to the diet, in which he requested that they would either choose a king from among themselves, or elect the brother of the King of France. Some zealous Frenchman at the Sublime Porte had officiously procured this recommendation from the enemy of Christianity; but an alliance with Mahometanism did no service to Montluc, either with the catholics or the evangelicals. The bishop was in despair, and thought that his handiwork of six months’ toil and trouble was to be shook into pieces in an hour. Montluc, being shown the letter, instantly insisted that it was a forgery, designed to injure his master the duke. The letter was attended by some suspicious circumstances; and the French bishop, quick at expedients, snatched at an advantage which the politician knows how to lay hold of in the chapter of accidents. “The letter was not sealed with the golden seal, nor enclosed in a silken purse or cloth of gold; and farther, if they examined the translation,” he said, “they would find that it was not written on Turkish paper.” This was a piece of the sieur’s good fortune, for the letter was not forged; but owing to the circumstance that the Boyar of Wallachia had taken out the letter to send a translation with it, which the vizier had omitted, it arrived without its usual accompaniments; and the courier, when inquired after, was kept out of the way: so that, in a few days, nothing more was heard of the great vizier’s letter. “Such was our fortunate escape,” says the secretary, “from the friendly but fatal interference of the sultan, than which the sieur dreaded nothing so much.”

Many secret agents of the different powers were spinning their dark intrigues; and often, when discovered or disconcerted, the creatures were again at their “dirty work.” These agents were conveniently disavowed or acknowledged by their employers. The Abbé Cyre was an active agent of the emperor’s, and though not publicly accredited, was still hovering about. In Lithuania he had contrived matters so well as to have gained over that important province for the archduke; and was passing through Prussia to hasten to communicate with the emperor, but “some honest men,” quelques bons personnages, says the French secretary, and no doubt some good friends of his master, “took him by surprise, and laid him up safely in the castle of Marienburgh, where truly he was a little uncivilly used by the soldiers, who rifled his portmanteau and sent us his papers, when we discovered all his foul practices.” The emperor, it seems, was angry at the arrest of his secret agent; but as no one had the power of releasing the Abbé Cyre at that moment, what with receiving remonstrances and furnishing replies, the time passed away, and a very troublesome adversary was in safe custody during the election. The dissensions between the catholics and the evangelicals were always on the point of breaking out; but Montluc succeeded in quieting these inveterate parties by terrifying their imaginations with sanguinary civil wars, and invasions of the Turks and the Tartars. He satisfied the catholics with the hope that time would put an end to heresy, and the evangelicals were glad to obtain a truce from persecution. The day before the election Montluc found himself so confident, that he despatched a courier to the French court, and expressed himself in the true style of a speculative politician, that des douze tables du Damier nous en avons les Neufs assurés.

There were preludes to the election; and the first was probably in acquiescence with a saturnalian humour prevalent in some countries, where the lower orders are only allowed to indulge their taste for the mockery of the great at stated times and on fixed occasions. A droll scene of a mock election, as well as combat, took place between the numerous Polish pages, who, saith the grave secretary, are still more mischievous than our own: these elected among themselves four competitors, made a senate to burlesque the diet, and went to loggerheads. Those who represented the archduke were well beaten, the Swede was hunted down, and for the Piastis, they seized on a cart belonging to a gentleman, laden with provisions, broke it to pieces, and burnt the axle-tree, which in that country is called a piasti, and cried out The Piasti is burnt! nor could the senators at the diet that day command any order or silence. The French party wore white handkerchiefs in their hats, and they were so numerous as to defeat the others.

The next day, however, opened a different scene; “the nobles prepared to deliberate, and each palatine in his quarters was with his companions on their knees, and many with tears in their eyes, chanting a hymn to the Holy Ghost; it must be confessed that this looked like a work of God,” says our secretary, who probably understood the manœuvring of the mock combat, or the mock prayers, much better than we may. Everything tells at an election, burlesque or solemnity!

The election took place, and the Duke of Anjou was proclaimed King of Poland—but the troubles of Montluc did not terminate. When they presented certain articles for his signature, the bishop discovered that these had undergone material alterations from the proposals submitted to him before the proclamation; these alterations referred to a disavowal of the Parisian massacre; the punishment of its authors, and toleration in religion. Montluc refused to sign, and cross-examined his Polish friends about the original proposals; one party agreed that some things had been changed, but that they were too trivial to lose a crown for; others declared that the alterations were necessary to allay the fears, or secure the safety, of the people. Our Gallic diplomatist was outwitted, and after all his intrigues and cunning, he found that the crown of Poland was only to be delivered on conditional terms.

In this dilemma, with a crown depending on a stroke of his pen,—remonstrating, entreating, arguing, and still delaying, like “Ancient Pistol” swallowing his leek, he witnessed with alarm some preparations for a new election, and his rivals on the watch with their protests. Montluc, in despair, signed the conditions—“assured, however,” says the secretary, who groans over this finale, “that when the elected monarch should arrive, the states would easily be induced to correct them, and place things in statu quo, as before the proclamation. I was not a witness, being then despatched to Paris with the joyful news, but I heard that the sieur evesque it was thought would have died in this agony, of being reduced to the hard necessity either to sign, or to lose the fruits of his labours. The conditions were afterwards for a long while disputed in France.” De Thou informs us, in lib. lvii. of his history, that Montluc after signing these conditions wrote to his master, that he was not bound by them, because they did not concern Poland in general, and that they had compelled him to sign, what at the same time he had informed them his instructions did not authorise. Such was the true Jesuitic conduct of a grey-haired politician, who at length found that honest plain sense could embarrass and finally entrap the creature of the cabinet, the artificial genius of diplomatic finesse.

The secretary, however, views nothing but his master’s glory in the issue of this most difficult negotiation; and the triumph of Anjou over the youthful archduke, whom the Poles might have moulded to their will, and over the King of Sweden, who claimed the crown by his queen’s side, and had offered to unite his part of Livonia with that which the Poles possessed. He labours hard to prove that the palatines and the castellans were not pratiqués, i.e., had their votes bought up by Montluc, as was reported; from their number and their opposite interests, he confesses that the sieur evesque slept little, while in Poland, and that he only gained over the hearts of men by that natural gift of God which acquired him the title of the happy ambassador. He rather seems to regret that France was not prodigal of her purchase-money, than to affirm that all palatines were alike scrupulous of their honour.