Part 1 (1/2)

Rupert Prince Palatine.

by Eva Scott.

PREFACE

It is curious that in these days of historical research so little has been written about Rupert of the Rhine, a man whose personality was striking, whose career was full of exciting adventure, and for whose biography an immense amount of material is available.

His name is known to most people in connection with the English Civil War, many have met with him in the pages of fiction, some imagine him to have been the inventor of mezzotint engraving, and a few know that he was Admiral of England under Charles II. But very few indeed could tell who he was, and where and how he lived, before and after the Civil War.

The present work is an attempt to sketch the character and career of this remarkable man; the history of the Civil War, except so far as it concerns the Prince, forming no part of its scope. Nevertheless, the study of Prince Rupert's personal career throws valuable side-lights on the history of the war, and especially upon the internal dissensions which tore the Royalist party to pieces and were a princ.i.p.al cause of its ultimate collapse. From Rupert's adventures and correspondence we also learn much concerning the life of the exiled Stuarts during the years of the Commonwealth; while his post-Restoration history is closely connected with the Naval Affairs of England.

The number of ma.n.u.scripts and other doc.u.ments which bear record of Rupert's life is enormous. Chief amongst them are the Domestic State Papers, preserved in the Public Record Office; the Clarendon State Papers, and the Carte Papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Lansdowne Ma.n.u.scripts in the British Museum, and the Rupert {vi} Correspondence, which originally comprised some thousands of letters and other papers collected by the Prince's secretary. The collection has now been broken up and sold; but the Transcripts of Mr. Firth of Balliol College, Oxford, were made before the collection was divided, and comprise the whole ma.s.s of correspondence. For the loan of these Transcripts, and for much valuable advice I am deeply indebted to Mr.

Firth. I also wish to acknowledge the kind a.s.sistance of Mr. Ha.s.sall of Christchurch, Oxford.

Some of the Rupert Papers were published by Warburton, fifty years ago, in a work now necessarily somewhat out of date. But there is printed entire the log kept in the Prince's own s.h.i.+p, 1650-1653, which is here quoted in chapters 13 and 14; also in Warburton are to be found the letters addressed by the Prince to Colonel William Legge, 1644-1645.

The Bromley Letters, published 1787, relate chiefly to Rupert's early life, and to the years of exile, 1650-1660. The Carte Papers are invaluable for the history of the Civil War, and of Rupert's transactions with the fleet, 1648-50; and in the Thurloe and Clarendon State Papers much is to be found relating to the wanderings of Rupert and the Stuarts on the Continent.

With regard to the Prince's family relations, German authorities are fullest and best. Chief among these are the letters of the Elector Charles Louis, and the letters and memoirs of Sophie, Electress of Hanover, all published from the Preussischen Staats-Archieven; also the letters of the Elector's daughter, the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans, published from the same source. Besides these, Hausser's ”Geschichte der Rheinischen Pfalz”, and Reiger's ”Ausgeloschte Simmerischen Linie” are very useful.

Mention of the Prince is also found in the ma.s.s of Civil War Pamphlets preserved in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, and in contemporary memoirs, letters and diaries, on the description of which there is not s.p.a.ce to enter here.

CHAPTER I

THE PALATINE FAMILY

”A man that hath had his hands very deep in the blood of many innocent people in England,” was Cromwell's concise description of Rupert of the Rhine.[1]

”That diabolical Cavalier” and ”that ravenous vulture” were the flattering t.i.tles bestowed upon him by other soldiers of the Parliament.[2] ”The Prince that was so gallant and so generous,” wrote an Irish Royalist.[3] And said Cardinal Mazarin, ”He is one of the best and most generous princes that I have ever known.”[4]

Rupert was not, in short, a person who could be regarded with indifference. By those with whom he came in contact he was either adored or execrated, and it is remarkable that a man who made so strong an impression upon his contemporaries should have left so slight a one upon posterity. To most people he is a name and nothing more;--a being akin to those iron men who sprang from Jason's dragon teeth, coming into life at the outbreak of the English Civil War to disappear with equal suddenness at its close. He is regarded, on the one hand, as a blood-thirsty, plundering ruffian, who endeavoured to teach in England lessons of cruelty learnt in the Thirty Years' War; {2} on the other, as a mere headstrong boy who ruined, by his indiscretion, a cause for which he exposed himself with reckless courage. Neither of these views does him justice, and his true character, his real influence on English history are lost in a cloud of mist and prejudice. His character had in it elements of greatness, but was so full of contradictions as to puzzle even the astute Lord Clarendon, who, after a long study of the Prince, was reduced to the exclamation--”The man is a strange creature!”[5] And strange Rupert undoubtedly was! Born with strong pa.s.sions, endowed with physical strength, and gifted with talents beyond those of ordinary men, but placed too early in a position of great trial and immense responsibility, his history, romantic and interesting throughout, is the history of a failure.

In his portraits, of which a great number are in existence, the story may be read. We see him first a st.u.r.dy, round-eyed child, looking out upon the world with a valiant wonder. A few years later the face is grown thinner and sadder, full of thought and a gentle wistfulness, as though he had found the world too hard for his understanding. At sixteen he is still thoughtful, but less wistful,--a gallant, handsome boy with a graceful bearing and a bright intelligent face, just touched with the melancholy peculiar to the Stuart race. At five-and-twenty his mouth had hardened and his face grown stern, under a burden which he was too young to bear. After that comes a lapse of many years till we find him embittered, worn, and sad; a man who has seen his hopes destroyed and his well-meant efforts perish. Lastly, we have the Rupert of the Restoration; no longer sick at heart and desperately sad, but a Rupert who has out-lived hope and joy, disappointment and sorrow; a handsome man, with a keen intellectual face, but old before his time, and made hard and cold and contemptuous by suffering and loneliness.

{3}

The first few months of Rupert's existence were the most prosperous of his life, but he was not a year old before his troubles began. His father, Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, had been married at sixteen to the famous Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England; the match was not a brilliant one for the Princess Royal of England, but it was exceedingly popular with the English people, who regarded Frederick with favour as the leader of the Calvinist Princes of the Empire. Elizabeth was no older than her husband, and seems to have been considerably more foolish. Her extravagancies and Frederick's difficult humours were the despair of their patient and faithful household steward; yet for some years they dwelt at Heidelberg in peaceful prosperity, and there three children were born to them, Frederick Henry, Charles Louis, and Elizabeth.

But the Empire, though outwardly at peace, was inwardly seething with religious dissension, which broke out into open war on the election of Ferdinand of Styria, (the cousin and destined successor of the Emperor,) as King of Bohemia. Ferdinand was a staunch Roman Catholic, the friend and pupil of the Jesuits, with a reputation for intolerance even greater than he deserved.[6] As a matter of fact Protestantism was abhorrent to him, less as heresy, than as the root of moral and political disorder. The Church of Rome was, in his eyes, the fount of order and justice, and he was strongly imbued with the idea, then prevalent in the Empire, that to princes belonged the settlement of religion in those countries over which they ruled.

But it happened that the Protestants of Bohemia had, at that moment, the upper hand. The turbulent n.o.bles of the country were bent on establis.h.i.+ng at once their political and religious independence; they rose in revolt, threw the Emperor's ministers out of the Council Chamber window at Prague, and rejected Ferdinand as king.

{4}

The Lutheran Princes looked on the revolt coldly, feeling no sympathy with Bohemia. They believed as firmly as did Ferdinand himself in the right of secular princes to settle theological disputes. They were loyal Imperialists, and hated Calvinism, anarchy and war, far more than they hated Roman Catholicism.

With the Calvinist princes of the south, at the head of whom stood the Elector Palatine and the Landgrave of Hesse Ca.s.sel, the case was different. Fear of their Catholic neighbours, Bavaria and the Franconian bishoprics, made them war-like; they sympathised strongly with their Bohemian co-religionists, they longed to break the power of the Emperor, and were even willing to call in foreign aid to effect their purpose. Schemes for their own personal aggrandis.e.m.e.nt played an equal part with their religious enthusiasm, and their plots and intrigues gave Ferdinand a very fair excuse for his unfavourable view of Protestantism.

For a time they merely talked, and on the death of Matthias they acquiesced in the election of Ferdinand as Emperor: but only a few days later Frederick was invited by the Bohemians to come and fill their vacant throne.