Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges

by William Makepeace Thackeray

Captain Esmond laughed in his turn. “You have indeed a curious knowledge,” he says. A foible of Mr. Holt's, who did know more about books and men than, perhaps, almost any person Esmond had ever met, was omniscience; thus in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but not quite. Esmond's wound was in the right side, not the left, his first general was General Lumley; Mr. Webb came out of Wiltshire, not out of Yorkshire; and so forth. Esmond did not think fit to correct his old master in these trifling blunders, but they served to give him a knowledge of the other's character, and he smiled to think that this was his oracle of early days; only now no longer infallible or divine.

“Yes,” continues Father Holt, or Captain von Holtz, “for a man who has not been in England these eight years, I know what goes on in London very well. The old dean is dead, my Lady Castlewood's father. Do you know that your recusant bishops wanted to consecrate him Bishop of Southampton, and that Collier is Bishop of Thetford by the same imposition? The Princess Anne has the gout and eats too much; when the king returns, Collier will be an archbishop.”

“Amen!” says Esmond, laughing; “and I hope to see your eminence no longer in jack-boots, but red stockings, at Whitehall.”

“You are always with us—I know that—I heard of that when you were at Cambridge; so was the late lord; so is the young viscount.”

“And so was my father before me,” said Mr. Esmond, looking calmly at the other, who did not, however, show the [pg 269] least sign of intelligence in his impenetrable grey eyes—how well Harry remembered them and their look! only crows' feet were wrinkled round them—marks of black old Time had settled there.

Esmond's face chose to show no more sign of meaning than the father's. There may have been on the one side and the other just the faintest glitter of recognition, as you see a bayonet shining out of an ambush; but each party fell back, when everything was again dark.

“And you, mon capitaine, where have you been?” says Esmond, turning away the conversation from this dangerous ground, where neither chose to engage.

“I may have been in Pekin,” says he, “or I may have been in Paraguay—who knows where? I am now Captain von Holtz, in the service of his electoral highness, come to negotiate exchange of prisoners with his highness of Savoy.”

'Twas well known that very many officers in our army were well-affected towards the young king at St. Germains, whose right to the throne was undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current. It wounded our English pride to think, that a shabby High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes of our ancient English nobility, who could not speak a word of our language, and whom we chose to represent as a sort of German boor, feeding on train-oil and sauerkraut, with a bevy of mistresses in a barn, should come to reign over the proudest and most polished people in the world. Were we, the conquerors of the Grand Monarch, to submit to that ignoble domination? What did the Hanoverian's Protestantism matter to us? Was it not notorious (we were told and led to believe so) that one of the daughters of this Protestant hero was being bred up with no religion at all, as yet, and ready to be made Lutheran or Roman, according as the husband might be, whom her parents should find for her? This talk, very idle and abusive much of it was, went on at a hundred mess-tables in the army; there was scarce an ensign that did not hear it, or join in it, and everybody knew, or affected to know, that the commander-in-chief himself had relations with his nephew, the Duke of Berwick [pg 270] ('twas by an Englishman, thank God, that we were beaten at Almanza), and that his grace was most anxious to restore the royal race of his benefactors, and to repair his former treason.

This is certain, that for a considerable period no officer in the duke's army lost favour with the commander-in-chief for entertaining or proclaiming his loyalty towards the exiled family. When the Chevalier de St. George, as the King of England called himself, came with the dukes of the French blood royal, to join the French army under Vendosme, hundreds of ours saw him and cheered him, and we all said he was like his father in this, who, seeing the action of La Hogue fought between the French ships and ours, was on the side of his native country during the battle. But this, at least the chevalier knew, and every one knew, that, however well our troops and their general might be inclined towards the prince personally, in the face of the enemy there was no question at all. Wherever my lord duke found a French army, he would fight and beat it, as he did at Oudenarde, two years after Ramillies, where his grace achieved another of his transcendent victories; and the noble young prince, who charged gallantly along with the magnificent Maison-du-Roy, sent to compliment his conquerors after the action.