Turpe——
And indeed we find that those Lovers who have best understood their business, have not only constantly followed the advice of Ovid, and chearfully submitted to receive such corrections as their Mistresses were pleased to impose upon them; but when they have happened to have been involuntarily guilty of offences of a somewhat grievous kind, they have done more; they have, of themselves, offered freely to submit to them. Thus Polyenos, in the Satyr of Petronius, who had been guilty with Circe of one of those faults which Ladies so difficultly prevail upon themselves to forgive, who had in short committed that offence which the abovementioned Miller boasted he never happened to be guilty of, wrote afterwards to her,—“If you want to kill me, I will come to you with an iron weapon; or if you are satisfied with stripes, I run naked to my Mistress.” (Polyaenos Circæ salutem.... Sive occidere placet, cum ferro venio; sive verberibus contenta es, curro nudus ad dominam. Id tantum memento, non me, sed instrumenta, peccasse, &c. Cap. 130.)
The illustrious Count of Guiche, as we find in the Count of Buffi’s Amorous History of Gauls, a Book which caused the disgrace of its Author, on account of the liberties he had taken in it with the character of King Lewis the Fourteenth, and his Mistress, Madame de la Valiere, the Count of Guiche, I say, one of the first-rate Beaux of the Court of the King just mentioned, behaved in the same manner that Polyenos had done. Having committed a fault with the well-known Countess of Olonne, of the same kind with that of Polyenos, he wrote the next day to the Countess in much the same terms as the latter had done to Circe. ‘If you want me to die, I will bring you my sword; if you think I only deserve to be flagellated, I will come to you in my shirt.’ (Si vous voulez ma mort, j’irai vous porter mon épée; si vous jugez que je ne mérite que le fouët, j’irai vous trouver en chemise.)
The celebrated Earl of Essex, in one of the misunderstandings between him, and Queen Elizabeth, having given her a more than common cause of offence, and wishing in a particular manner to soothe her resentment, wrote to her in much the same terms as those abovementioned. He gave the Queen, as we find in Camden, explicit thanks for the corrections she had inflicted upon him, and kissed (to use his words, as recited by the above Author) and ‘kissed her Majesty’s Royal Hand, and the rod which had chastised him.’ Not that I propose, however, by quoting the above expressions of the Earl, positively to affirm that they were meant to allude to any express corrections of the kind mentioned in this Book, which his Royal Mistress had at any time used to inflict upon him, or the other persons in her service; but yet, when we, on the one hand, attend to the invariable corruption, profligacy, shamelessness, wickedness, and perverseness of Ministers, ever since the beginning of the world, and on the other, consider to what degree those employed by the Princess we speak of, proved just, and zealous for the public good, we cannot help thinking that that great and magnanimous Queen had found out some very peculiar method of rendering them such[113].
[112] The abovementioned Lord Munson had sat as one of the Judges at the King’s Trial: he lived at St. Edmundsbury, when his Wife, with the assistance of her Maids, served him with a flagellation. An allusion to the same fact is also made in a song which is to be found in the Collection of Loyal Songs. The thanks her Ladyship received from the Sessions Court, were owing to its being generally suspected the Noble Lord had altered his political principles; for which his Wife had chastised him.
It really seems that a kind of flagellating fanaticism had taken place, in those days, in this Country, similar in many respects to that which arose in the times of Cardinal Damian and Dominic the Cuirassed: there was this difference however, that it had for its object to flagellate, not one’s-self, but others; which was the wiser folly of the two. The thanks publicly decreed to Lady Munson (not to mention several puritanical publications of those days) are proofs of that flagellating spirit we mention; as well as the correction inflicted by Zachary Crofton upon his servant maid (see [p. 238]), and the pamphlet he wrote in defence of it; which was very likely grounded on certain religious tenets concerning the mortification of the flesh, &c. that were current in those times.
[113] It came out, in a certain late debate in the House of Commons (June 1783) that, among the expences in the office of a prime Minister, about a year before out of place, there was an article (introduced among the Stationary ware) of three hundred and forty pounds for whip-cord, for one year. It is very probably since the days of Queen Elizabeth, that this kind of commodity has been made part of the national expenditure.
CHAP. XXIII.
Formation of the public Processions of Flagellants. Different success they meet with, in different Countries.