And coming down to later times, a practical joke which was played by the Duke of Montagu on Heidegger, a celebrated conductor of operas and masquerades, is said to have been much enjoyed by George II. A few days previous to one of Heidegger’s famous masquerades, at which the King had promised to be present, the Duke of Montagu invited the German to sup with him at the Devil’s Tavern in Fleet Street, and plied him with wine till he became helplessly intoxicated. Whilst in this condition, Mrs. Salmon was commissioned to take a cast of his face, which was afterwards painted “to the very image of life.” The Duke then procured a suit of clothes exactly like Heidegger’s ordinary costume, and having procured a person whose voice and figure resembled those of the German, he managed to create an excellent counterpart of his unfortunate victim. On the evening of the masquerade Heidegger ordered the band to play the National Anthem as soon as the King and his suite arrived; whereupon the counterfeit Heidegger commanded them to play the Jacobite tune of “Over the water to Charley.” The King and the players were in the secret of the joke, for the former laughed immoderately, and the latter followed the orders of the fictitious manager. Heidegger was in a state of fury, and when informed by the Duke of Montagu of his Majesty’s displeasure at the insolence of the band, repaired to the royal box to vindicate his character. The King kept up the joke for a time, and terminated it by ordering the counterfeit Heidegger to remove his mask.
On New Year’s Eve 1745 Frederick the Great, in celebration of the peace with Silesia, gave at the Opera House a masked ball, to which every one, without distinction, was admitted. The Court and the nobility were entertained at six large tables, in addition to which people of every rank and station found on all sides richly furnished buffets. On the square before the Opera House a temple of Janus was erected, behind which a grand display of fireworks took place. The ball lasted till morning, the maskers giving only too manifest proof that they had found the wines most excellent. But the King, who made the round of the tables, where he saw a good deal of his plate finding its way into the pockets of his guests, and discovered many persons lying hopelessly drunk in the lobbies of the house, remarked, “I shall never repeat this joke.”
On the 13th of March 1799 the Opera House of Berlin was the scene of a masquerade which contemporary reports describe as well worthy of the days of Louis XIV., or of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. It represented the marriage of the English Queen Mary with Philip of Spain, the character of the bride being supported by Queen Louisa, and that of the bridegroom by the Duke of Sussex. A minuet of these two royal personages was followed by a quadrille between Queen Elizabeth, Don John of Austria, Margaret of Parma, and the Duke of Savoy.
On the evening of March 16, 1792, Gustavus III. was mortally wounded at a masked ball at the Opera House at Stockholm, and died, after great suffering, on the 29th. The pistol-shot was fired by a man of noble family, Ankarström, formerly a captain in the Guards, who, having retired from active service, and still holding a half-civil command in the island of Gothland, had been—rightly or wrongly—accused of a traitorous understanding with the Finland mutineers in 1788. He had, therefore, been sentenced by the King to a term of imprisonment. This sentence, it has been suggested, and the wrongs his order had sustained in the constitutional changes of 1789, may have wrought a mind naturally gloomy into madness; in addition to which he is said to have lost heavily by a sudden depreciation of paper money to an extent of 30 per cent. Hence the King, in his eyes, was a tyrant and a robber, and he vowed vengeance. With him were joined several other discontented and angry nobles, who had suffered arrest in 1789, and had real or fancied wrongs to avenge; and it may be added that the King’s secretary, Bjelke, who enjoyed much of his Majesty’s confidence, persuaded him to go to the ball, taking care to give timely notice to the conspirators.
At night, after Christina had taken the most solemn step of abandoning the community of Luther for the Church of Rome, at Innsbruck, in Tyrol, the Archduke entertained her with a masque and dancing. Nor was this all, for there was a play represented before her that evening, the moral of which, it is said, was not of the cleanest, and upon which the illustrious convert made this comment: “Well, gentlemen, it is but proper that you should entertain me with a comedy to-night, since I amused you with a farce this morning”—a profane remark, concerning which the great Leibnitz remarks that, if it was really uttered, it proved that “Christina was not mindful of—decorum!”
CHAPTER X
ROYALTY IN DISGUISE
To avoid the dangers inseparable from war, or to seek a temporary concealment in political troubles, has caused many a monarch in times past to assume the most varied disguises, the circumstances connected with which forming some of the most romantic episodes in history. In “Candide, or the Optimist,” Voltaire tells in an admirable manner how eight travellers meet in an obscure inn, and some of them with not even sufficient money to pay for a scurvy dinner; but in the course of conversation they are discovered to be eight monarchs in Europe, who had been deprived of their crowns. And what gave point to this satire was that these eight monarchs were not the fictitious majesties of the poetic brain—“imperial shadows like those that appeared to Macbeth,” but living monarchs who were wandering at that moment about the world. If tradition be true, there is Alfred the disguised minstrel in the Danish camp; and, later on, romance tells how the last of the Saxon kings lived and died disguised as a hermit in a cell at Chester. Another traditionary story informs us that the Emperor Henry V., husband of Matilda of England, did not die at the time he was said to have done so; but fled, disguised “in a woollen garment,” to England, where, at Westchester, he lived for ten years as the hermit “God’s Call.” And it is further told how the Empress Matilda, when hotly pursued by Stephen’s troops at Devizes, made her escape by personating a corpse when wrapped in grave clothes, and placed in a coffin. She was borne on the shoulders of some of her trusty partisans to Gloucester, where, it is said, she arrived “faint and weary with long fasting and mortal terror.” It is not, however, with disguise as associated with the vicissitudes of royalty that we are concerned, but rather as adopted by sovereigns for some freak, or fancy.
Thus Charles VI. of France spent large sums of money in the pursuit of pleasure, and, amidst other excesses, he was fond of disguising himself. In the first week of the year 1393 there were festive doings at Court, in consequence of the nuptials of the Queen’s favourite, a German lady. It was her third marriage, and the event was considered to give occasion for more than usual licence. As a novel diversion, it was proposed to the King and his companions by one named Guisay to attire themselves as satyrs, and, under cover of their masks, to taunt and tease the wedding party. Accordingly, the disguise was effected by means of linen dresses, to which tow was fixed with pitch. Dressed in this manner, five of the party joined the wedding company at the Hôtel St. Pol, and indulged in the most extravagant cries, dances, and gestures, when the mad idea seized the Duke of Orleans of setting fire to the dresses of the masqueraders. Instantly they were in flames, with the exception of the King, whom the Duchess of Berri covered with her robe. But the others perished, except one, who managed to save himself by leaping into a butt of water. The accident, it is said,[77] might have become more serious, by reason of the anger of the people, who, “when they learned it, attributed all to the dissolute folly of the Court, and were for taking vengeance on those present for the danger which had befallen the King.”
It is also recorded of the same monarch that his treasurer, Noujant, was most desirous to lay by a certain sum for any urgent necessity that might arise; and in order to secure the King’s approval, he proposed to frame with it a golden stag which should be marvellous as a work of wealth and art. But more than the neck and head of this stag was never completed, for the King found another which pleased him better—a gilded stag which could hold a sword and shake it. And, in order to exhibit this, “he imagined the public entrance of the Queen into Paris. He himself went to see the procession in disguise, mounted behind one of his servitors, his eagerness to enjoy his own spectacle bringing upon his back many a blow from the serjeants who cleared the way for the pageant. The King boasted of having received these blows in a good joke.”[78]