Ancestry of President Adams.
John Adams, second President of the United States of America, is commonly but erroneously represented to have been the son of a cobbler. Now, he was the son of a clergyman. His descent would have graced any Court in Europe. He was descended from one of the oldest families in Devonshire and Gloucestershire, one of whom sat as an English Baron in the Parliaments of Edward the First. His father, Adam Fitzherbert, was lineally descended from the ancient Counts de Vermandois. Lord ap-Adam’s wife (the ancestress of this second President of America) was the daughter and sole heiress of John Lord de Gournay, of Beverston Castle, Gloucestershire, the representative of the ancient House of Harpitré de Gournai, a branch of the great house of “Yvery,” which was connected with every Sovereign house in Europe. It would be difficult to find a higher descent. The late Mr. Edward Adams, M.P., of Middleton Hall, Carmarthenshire, was a descendant of the elder branch of this family; and Mr. Anthony Davis, of Misbourne House, Chalfont Saint Giles, Bucks, is its representative.
The Irish Union.
It was after the exhaustion caused by the Rebellion in Ireland, that Pitt brought forward his project of the Union, and Lord Cornwallis successfully accomplished it. Mr. Massey describes at great length the means by which, in Castlereagh’s phrase, “the fee simple of Irish corruption was bought;” and the Irish Parliament, like Tarpeia, perished beneath the weight of stipulated bribery. No person acquainted in the least with history, or having any regard for Ireland, will fail to rejoice at the success of a measure which relieved her instantly from a worthless Legislature, and by incorporating her with Great Britain assured her the prospect of just government. But the delay in the grant of Catholic Emancipation, which Pitt had intended to accompany the Union, retarded for many years its benefits; and another part of the Minister’s scheme, a State provision for the Catholic priesthood, remains to this day unaccomplished. Pitt incurred a heavy responsibility on this account. It appears certain from the Castlereagh correspondence that the Irish Catholics supported the Union on something like an implied pledge that they should obtain their political rights; and on this ground, and on that, besides, of the State necessity for emancipation, Pitt can hardly escape the censure of history for not having insisted more strongly in carrying out his policy as a whole, and especially for having, in 1805, consented not to press the subject on the King when he formed his second brief Administration. It is doubtful, however, Mr. Massey observes, whether Pitt could at any period have extorted compliance from George III., or, indeed, from the people of England; and, though his conduct in this matter was not chivalrous as an individual, he may have conceived, as a public man, that he had satisfied honour by his resigning in 1801, and that afterwards he would have not been justified in depriving the country of his services for the sake of a policy impracticable at the moment.—Times review of Massey’s Hist. England.
The published Correspondence of Lord Cornwallis gives, with painful minuteness, the details of management and bribery by which the Union between Great Britain and Ireland was carried to a conclusion; but most readers of the history of the period are satisfied with knowing that the Union was a political necessity, that the parties to be dealt with in effecting it—the Irish Parliament and its patrons—were utterly corrupt, and that persuasion was the only method which it was possible to employ. The result was inevitable. The Government bid high, and as it bid the vendors raised their prices, and still the Government bid higher. At last the owners of seats were gorged with the sum of 15,000l. for each disfranchised borough, and the whole amount of compensation thus extorted reached the magnificent figure of 1,260,000l. We can hardly be thankful enough that Lord Grey’s Government had the firmness to resist the application of so inconvenient a precedent in the Reform Bill of 1832.
The House of Bonaparte.
The Moniteur in 1862 contained five columns on the pedigree of Bonaparte, from Anno Domini 1170, when the first of that name headed an Italian league at Treviso against the German invaders under Frederic Barbarossa. John Bonaparte signs a treaty at Constance on behalf of Italy, and writes himself consul, being in fact le premier consul of his race, in 1182. Two centuries after the Bonaparte escutcheon on their house in St. Andrew’s-square, at Treviso, is ordered to be broken by Venice; and 440 years afterwards that republic is suppressed by a Bonaparte at the treaty of Campo Formio. Details are given of the family’s removal to Florence, San Miniato, and Corsica; of the sack of Rome, at which Jacopo Bonaparte assisted in 1520, and of a comedy, La Vedova, from the pen of another about the same period. Muratori’s Antiquitates Italicæ, vols. 8, 9, and 12, folio, contain numerous diplomatic documents signed by members of this stirring house, ever active in all the revolutions of mediæval Italy. The Moniteur becomes quite an enthusiast about the land that produced this chosen race. The oddest revelation is the fact, that Mala-parte was the original name before 1170, just as it was of the Bolognese family Malatesta, the change having been voted by popular acclaim in public assembly at Treviso. So far the Moniteur. But it might be added that the Beauharnais family, through which the present Emperor comes, had undergone a precisely similar change of name at the request of Marie Antoinette. That house had been known for ages in Poitou as Seigneurs de Bellescouilles, an appellation not quite fitting the Court at Versailles, and altered accordingly. It is rather remarkable that Napoleon I., in the Moniteur of 22nd Messidor, an XIII., 1805, had scouted all idea of ancestry, and ordered a formal declaration to be inserted that his house dated from Marengo, quoting the lines of La Fontaine—“Rien n’est dangereux qu’un sot ami,” meaning the person who had drawn out his pedigree.
The Register of the Imperial family is a large folio volume, bound in red velvet, and having at the corners ornaments of silver-gilt, with the family cipher ‘N’ in the centre. It was commenced in 1806, and the first entry made was the adoption of Prince Eugène by the Emperor. The second, made the same year, relates to the adoption of the Princess Stephanie de Beauharnais, who died Grand Duchess of Baden, and who was cousin of the Empress Joséphine. Next comes the marriage of the Emperor Napoleon I.; then several certificates of the birth of Princes of the family, and lastly of the King of Rome, which closes the series of the certificates inscribed under the reign of the First Emperor. This register was confided to the care of Count Regnault de Saint-Jean-d’Angely, Minister and Councillor of State, and Secretary of the Imperial family. It was to him, under the First Empire, as it is now to the Minister of State under the Second, that was reserved the duty of drawing up the procès verbaux of the great acts relative to Napoleon. At the fall of the First Empire, Count Regnault de Saint-Jean-d’Angely carefully preserved the book, which at his death passed into the hands of the Countess, his widow. That lady handed it over to the President of the Republic when Louis Napoleon was called by universal suffrage to the Imperial throne.