[210] St. Thomas of Canterbury. A Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey de Vere, author of Alexander the Great. London: Henry S. King & Co. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)
THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.
It has been the lot of more than one disreputable character to be glorified by great poets. From Spenser to Tennyson have the praises of “Gloriana” been sung, to the no small detriment of truth, and of far worthier personages than she who, although in some respects a great queen, was guilty of ferocities almost beyond the capabilities of man, and of prolonged and calculating cruelties contrary to the very nature bestowed by God on woman. Again, Satan himself is portrayed in Milton’s stately poem as a being more magnificent than malignant. He “hates well” certainly, but his own utter hatefulness, and the base ingratitude to his Creator of which he is the first example, is sufficiently veiled to incline one to feel something akin to admiration or pity for the arch-rebel against God, the crafty seducer and pitiless destroyer of the souls of men.
Passing over other instances of false renown, and undazzled by the halo of romance cast around the “Prisoner of Chillon” by Lord Byron’s melodious lines (it would be more plain-spoken than polite to write this word, as here it ought to be written, i.e., without the n), let us
examine, by the sober light of history, into the merits of this more-than-doubtful hero, rendered by his captivity a person of interest, although there is every proof that the story of his arrest, in violation of a safe-conduct granted him by the duke of Savoy, is an invention.[211] Still more, however, does Bonivard owe his celebrity to Lord Byron, who apparently knew nothing of the “Prisoner” whose imaginary sufferings he sang, beyond his name, his Protestantism, and the fact of his imprisonment. The poem opens with a string of fictions, among which it is amusing to read that Bonivard was loaded with chains for the religion of his father, and that the said father had died on the rack, a martyr to a creed he refused to abjure, etc.
But imagination has had the upper hand long enough. Certain of our contemporaries abroad having recently referred to the “Prisoner of Chillon” as a martyr for liberty of conscience, it is time to bring down from his pedestal this Calvinist apostate, pointed to by Protestants as one of their models of virtue,
and who, we readily allow, turns out to be a fitting companion to similar “models” even more famous in their annals.
The Bonivards were an old bourgeois family of Chambéry, who from the thirteenth century had possessed a certain extent of feudal property. Thus they were subjects of the princes of Savoy, whose worst enemies were then the Genevese and Swiss. Now, it was under the protection of these latter that Bonivard, himself a Savoyard, came, in the vain hope of preserving the rich revenues of his priory of Saint Victor, to plant his batteries against his native country. At Geneva, he took his place among the first promoters of the freedom of the future republic, but no sooner did the Reformation become a movement of importance, from the standing of some of its leaders, than Bonivard disappears from the front, and falls into a lower rank; since, although a writer of some power and possessed of real talents, he was utterly lacking in energy and dignity of character, as also in firmness and consistency of purpose. In proof of this, it is enough to observe the continual applications for money with which he harassed the council of Geneva, while he was at the same time playing fast and loose between Savoy and Geneva, in the first place, and afterwards between Geneva and Berne, according to the advancement of his own interests, self being apparently the sole object of his worship. This “vain and versatile beggar”[212] was called
by one of the chiefs of the republic, the “Stultus M. de Sans-Saint-Victor.”