Claimants to Royalty

by John Henry Ingram

Many years elapsed, and Suatocopius was probably forgotten, when some monks brought his son the astounding information that his father, the king, had only just expired, in the distant and mean hermitage whence they came. The tale which they told, and which their hearer placed entire credence in, according to the history of Pope Pius, was to the effect that for several years they had housed and fed a wanderer who one day had besought their hospitality; during the whole time he had lived with them he had cheerfully and patiently endured all the hardships of their rough and indigent life, but finding his end approaching, the unknown had summoned them to his side and said:—

"Until the present moment you have not known who I am. Know then that I am the King of Moravia, who, having lost a battle, took refuge amongst you. I die, after having tasted the joys of reigning and of private life. The royal state is certainly not preferable to the repose of solitude. Here I sleep without fear and without disquietude, enjoying the calm and pleasures of life, tasting fruits and the purest water, which is far more agreeable than the most precious beverages the courts of kings afford. I have spent with you happily the remainder of the life God has granted me, and the time which I passed upon the throne now seems to me to have been a continual death.... When I am dead inter my body in this place, but go, I beg you, and inform my son, if he be still alive, what I have told you."

Soon after this confession the supposed king died; his body was duly interred by his fellow monks, and information of his decease sent to the reigning monarch. He, with all diligence, had the body disinterred and brought to Volgrade, the capital of Moravia, and, notwithstanding the years that had elapsed since the disappearance of Suatocopius, and the length of time the corpse had been buried, recognized the body as his father's, and had it deposited, with all due pomp and ceremony, in the royal sepulchre, to moulder, royal or plebeian, amid the ashes of his predecessors.

THE FALSE HENRY THE FIFTH OF GERMANY.

A.D. 1130.

Henry the Fifth of Germany, like so many other monarchs of the middle ages, had wrested the imperial crown from the head of his unfortunate father, Henry the Fourth. This latter emperor, having been dethroned by his unnatural son, took refuge with the Bishop of Liege, in whose city he died of grief.

The fifth Henry was fully recompensed for his undutiful conduct by the continual rebellion of his subjects in different portions of the imperial dominions, by the bitter hostility of his former friend, Archbishop Albert, of Mainz, and by the unceasing persecution of the Papacy. Henry the Fifth died childless in 1125, worn out with strife, and the sceptre passed into the hands of Lothaire the Second. Five years after the Emperor's death, a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy, startled his brother recluses by the assertion that he was the supposed deceased monarch, Henry the Fifth of Germany. He declared that being desirous of abdicating the crown which he had forced his unhappy parent to resign to him, he had spread the false intelligence of his own decease, and then had set out, in pilgrim garb, for the Holy Land. He narrated a pitiful tale of the indignities heaped upon his imperial head during the years of his pilgrimage; how he had narrowly escaped drowning through a man having brutally pushed him into the sea when he was on the point of embarkation; how he had been compelled by the Knights Templars, at Acre, to assist as a labourer at the construction of fortifications there; and many other equally edifying stories of his adventures. The monks appear to have believed in his identity, and some authors assert that by the express commands of Pope Innocent the Second, a firm friend of the Emperor Lothaire the Second, he was never permitted to pass beyond the precincts of the abbey.

The historian Mezerai remarks that Henry was believed to have eventually retired to Angers, and to have ended his days as a servitor to the hospital there; having, however, previous to his death, acknowledged his rank to his confessor, and been seen and recognized by his wife Maud, daughter of Henry the Second of England, who had taken another consort in the person of Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou.