Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

III

It was during the unsettled times that preceded the great French Revolution of 1848 – I think it was in January of that year – that one of Mr. Rogers’s breakfasts was attended by Prince Louis Napoleon Buonaparte, afterwards Napoleon III.; Dr. Whately, the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin; Lord William Pitt Lennox, the son of the Duke of Richmond (who distinguished himself at the battle of Waterloo, and died many years afterwards as Governor-General of Canada); and myself. I was previously acquainted with all these gentlemen, and had met the Prince a few days previously at the house of Mr. John MacGregor, formerly Secretary of the Board of Trade, and member of Parliament for Glasgow. The Prince, who was then forty years of age, had long been a resident in London as an exile, spoke English exceedingly well, had thoroughly studied the working of the British constitution, and had learned to respect and apparently to love the English people. He was very taciturn and undemonstrative; his dull grey eyes seemed to have little speculation in them, and to have been given to him, if such an expression may be used, to look inwards upon himself rather than outwards upon the world. They brightened up at rare intervals when anything was said that particularly interested him. On this occasion the talk of the breakfast table turned a good deal upon French politics and the probability, more or less imminent, of a revolutionary outbreak in Paris, consequent upon the unwise opposition of Louis Philippe and his too obsequious minister, M. Guizot, to the question of the extension of the franchise and the reform of the French Parliament. As I had within a fortnight or three weeks returned from Paris, where I had associated with some leading liberal politicians, among others with Béranger the poet and the Abbé de Lamennais, my opinion upon the situation was asked, I think, by Mr. Rogers, and whether I thought the agitation would subside. “Not,” I said, “unless the King yields.” “He won’t yield, I think,” said the Prince; “he does not understand the seriousness of the case.” I told the Prince that Béranger, who knew the temper and sympathised with the opinions of the people, had predicted the establishment of a Republic, consequent upon the downfall of the monarchy, within less than a twelvemonth. Lamennais did not give the King so long a lease of power, but foresaw revolution within six months. The Prince remarked that “if there were barricades in the streets of Paris, such as those by which his way to the throne was won in 1830, the King would not give orders to disperse the mob by force of arms.” “Why do you think so?” asked Mr. Rogers. “The King is a weak man, a merciful man. He does not like bloodshed. I often think he was a fool not to have had me shot after the affair of Strasburg. Had our cases been reversed I know that I would have had him shot without mercy,” I thought little of this remark at the time, but in after years, when the exiled Prince became the powerful emperor, my mind often reverted to this conversation, and I thought that if King Louis Philippe had done what the Prince considered he ought to have done – and as he would have been fully justified by law, civil and military, as well as by state policy, in doing – the whole course of European history would have been changed. Personally, the Prince was highly esteemed by all who knew him. Stern as a politician, and in pursuit of the great object of his ambition, as in the famous coup d’état of 1851 by which he raised himself at a bound from the comparatively humble and uncertain chair of a President to the most conspicuous imperial throne in the world – he was, in private life, of a singularly amiable temper. He never forgot in his prosperity the friends or even the acquaintances of his adversity; never ceased to remember any benefit that had been conferred upon him, and not only to be grateful for it, but to show his gratitude by acts of kindness and generosity, if the kindness or generosity could be of benefit to the fortunes of the persons on whom it was bestowed. When he sought the hand in marriage of a Princess of the House of Austria, and the honor was declined for the occult and unwhispered reason that he was a parvenu and an upstart, and that his throne was at the mercy of a revolution (and what throne is not?), he married for pure love and affection a noble lady of inferior rank, and raised her to a throne which she filled for many years with more grace and splendor than any contemporary sovereign born in the purple of royalty had ever exhibited, Queen Victoria alone excepted.

The Prince thoroughly understood the character of the French people. Napoleon I. had called the English a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon III. knew that the French were entitled in a far greater degree than the English to that depreciatory epithet. He knew that in their hearts they did not care so much for liberty and fraternity as they did for “equality,” – that what they wanted in the first place was peace, so that trade and industry might have a chance to prosper; and secondly, that France as a nation might be the predominant power in Europe. For the first reason, they required a master who would maintain order; for the second reason, they idolised the name of the first Napoleon. These two things were patent to the mind of Napoleon III., and formed the keystone of his domestic and foreign policy.

When London, about three months after the breakfast at Mr. Rogers’, was threatened, on April 10, 1848, by an insurrectionary mob of Chartists, under the guidance of a half-crazy Irishman, named Feargus O’Connor, who afterwards died in a lunatic asylum, the Prince volunteered to act as a special constable, for the preservation of the peace, in common with many thousands of respectable professional men, merchants, and tradesmen. I met him in Trafalgar Square, armed with the truncheon of a policeman. On this occasion, the Duke of Wellington, then commander-in-chief of the British army, had taken the precaution to station the military in sufficient numbers at all the chief strategical points of the metropolis ready, though concealed from the notice of the multitude, to act on an emergency. Happily their services were not required. The sovereign was popular; the upper and middle classes were unanimous; a large section of the laboring classes had no sympathy with Chartism, and the display of the civic force, with bludgeons and staves only, without firearms of any kind, was quite sufficient to overawe the rioters. I stopped for a minute to exchange greetings with the Prince, and said I did not think from all that I had heard that the Chartists would resort to violence, and that their march through the streets would be orderly. The Prince was of the same opinion, and passed upon his beat among other police special constables in front of the National Gallery.

As Lord William Lennox was of the breakfast party, I took the opportunity to ask him a question with regard to a disputed point. I had lately visited Brussels, the city in which I had passed my school-boy days, and which was consequently endeared to my mind by many youthful associations. The mother of Lord William, the beautiful Duchess of Richmond, had given a great ball on the night preceding the battle of Waterloo, in June, 1815, at which Lord William, then in his sixteenth year, was present. Every lover of poetry will remember the splendid description of this ball and of the subsequent battle which occurs in the third canto of Byron’s “Childe Harold.” The passage is unsurpassed in any language for the vigor, the picturesqueness, and the magnificence of its thought and diction, and in its relation to one of the most stupendous events in modern history.

It has been generally asserted and believed that the ball was given by the duchess in the grand hall of the stately Hôtel de Ville in the Grande Place, and when in Brussels I heard the assertion repeated by many people, though denied by others. One old citizen, who remembered the battle well, affirmed it to have been at the Hôtel de Ville, which he saw brilliantly lighted up for the occasion, and passed among the crowd of equipages that filled the Grande Place, when setting down and taking up the ladies who graced the assembly with their presence. Another equally old and trustworthy inhabitant declared that to his personal knowledge the ball was given in the “Palais d’Aes,” a large building that adjoins the palace of the King of the Belgians, and is now used as a barrack; while a third affirmed it to have been held in the handsome hotel, adjoining the Chamber of Deputies, which was formerly occupied by Sir Charles Bagot, the British Ambassador to Brussels and the Hague in 1830. Thinking there could be no better authority than one who was present on the occasion, one, moreover, who was so nearly allied to the giver of the entertainment, I asked Lord William to decide the point. He replied at once that all these assertions were unfounded. His father, the Duke, took a large house in a back street, called the “Rue de la Blanchisserie” (street of the laundry), abutting on the boulevard, opposite the present Botanic Garden, and that the ball took place in the not extraordinarily spacious drawing-room of that mansion. He said, moreover, that the lines —

conveyed an idea of magnitude which the so-called “high hall” did not in reality possess.

Archbishop Whately here said: “If we may be permitted without breach of good manners to speak of Waterloo in the presence of Prince Napoleon, I may remark that the correction of the very minor error just made by Lord William, though exceedingly interesting is not of great importance. Though contradicted again and again, the report still circulates, and is still believed, that the Duke of Wellington was surprised on the eve of the battle of Waterloo by the rapid march of the emperor, and was thus taken at a disadvantage.”

“I never believed the report,” said the Prince, “though I have my own views about the battle. I visited Waterloo in the winter of 1832, with what feelings you may imagine.”

“The truth as regards the alleged surprise,” said the Archbishop, “appears to be, as Lord Byron explained in a note to the passage in ‘Childe Harold,’ that the Duke had received intelligence of Napoleon’s march, and at first had the idea of requesting the Duchess of Richmond to countermand the ball; but, on reflection, considered it desirable that the people of Brussels should be kept in ignorance of the course of events. He, therefore, desired the duchess to let the ball proceed, and gave commands to all the general officers who had been invited to appear at it, each taking care to quit the room at ten o’clock quietly, and without giving any notification, except to each of the under officers, to join their respective divisions en route. There is no doubt that many of the subalterns who were not in the secret were surprised at the suddenness of the order.”

“I heard, when I visited the field of Waterloo less than a month ago,” I said, “that many of the officers joined the march in their dancing shoes, so little time was left for them to obey orders.”

“It has been proved to the satisfaction of every real inquirer into the facts,” said Mr. Rogers, “that as far as the duke himself and his superior officers were concerned, there was no surprise in the matter. You know the daring young lady, who presumed on her beauty to be forgiven for her impertinence, who asked the Duke point-blank at an evening party whether he had not been surprised at Waterloo. ‘Certainly not!’ he replied ‘but I am now.’”

“A proper rebuke,” said Lord William, “I hope the lady felt it.”

Byron, in the beautiful stanzas to which allusion has been made, describes the wood of Soignes, erroneously called Soignies, in the environs of Brussels, a portion of the great Forest of Ardennes:

In a note to this passage he speaks of Ardennes as famous in Boiardo’s “Orlando,” as immortal in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” Whatever may have been the case with Boiardo, it is all but certain that Shakespeare’s “Arden” was not the Ardennes near Brussels, but the forest of Arden, in Warwickshire, near his native town of Stratford-on-Avon. He frequented this “Arden” in his youth, perhaps in chasing the wild deer of Sir Thomas Lucy, perhaps in love-rambles with Anne Hathaway. Portions of this English forest still remain, containing in a now enclosed park – the property of a private gentleman – some venerable oak trees, one of which as I roughly measured it with my walking-stick is upwards of thirty feet in circumference within a yard of the ground. This tree, with several others still standing, must have been old in the days of Shakespeare; and in the shadow of which he himself may have reclined in the happy days ere he went to London in search of fame and fortune. “Arden,” spelled Ardennes in French, is a purely Celtic word, meaning the high forest, from Ard, high, and Airdean, heights. The English district is still called “Arden,” and the small town of Henley, within its boundaries, is described as Henley-in-Arden to distinguish it from the many other Henleys that exist in England.

Lord William Lennox married the once celebrated cantatrice, Miss Wood, from whom he was divorced. He was a somewhat voluminous author of third-rate novels, and a frequent contributor to the periodical press. He died in 1880, in his eighty-first year.

Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, was the author of a very able treatise on Logic and Rhetoric, long the text-book of the schools; and also of a once famous jeu d’esprit entitled “Historic Doubts concerning Napoleon Buonaparte,” in which he proved irrefragably by false logic likely to convince idle and unthinking readers, that no such person as Napoleon Buonaparte ever did exist or could have existed. In this clever little work he ridiculed, under the guise of seeming impartiality and critical acumen, the many attempts that had been made, especially by French writers of the school of Voltaire, to prove that Jesus Christ was a purely imaginary character, as much a myth as the gods of Grecian and Roman mythology. Mr. Greville, in his “Memoirs of the Courts of George III., George IV., and William IV.,” records that he met Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, at a dinner-party, and describes him “as a very ordinary man in appearance and conversation, with something pretentious in his talk, and as telling stories without point.” Nevertheless he admitted him to be “a very able man.” My opinion of the Archbishop was far more favorable. The first thing that struck me with regard to him was the clear precision of his reasoning, as befitted a man who had written with such undoubted authority on Logic and Rhetoric, and the second his rare tolerance for all conscientious differences of opinion on religious matters. Two years previously I had sat next to him on the platform of the inaugural meeting held by the members of The Athenæum at Manchester in support of that institution. Several bishops had been invited, and had signified their intention to be present, but all of them except Dr. Whately had withdrawn as soon as it was publicly announced that Mr. George Dawson, a popular lecturer and Unitarian preacher of advanced opinions, was to address the audience. Mr. Dawson, who was at the time a very young man, spoke with considerable eloquence and power, and impressed the audience favorably, the Archbishop included. “I think,” said Dr. Whately, turning to me at the conclusion of the speech, “that my reverend brethren would have taken no harm from being present to-night, and more than one of them, whom I could name, would be all the better if they could preach with as much power and spirit, as this boy has displayed in his speech.” On another occasion, when I was in Dublin in 1849. I heard that several ultra-orthodox Protestant clergymen in the city had been heard to express regret that Dr. Whately was so lax in his religious belief, and set so bad an example to his clergy. I asked in what manner, and was told in reply that he had publicly spoken of Dr. Daniel Murray, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, then in his 81st year, as “a good man, a very good man,” adding the hope that he himself should be found worthy to meet Murray in Heaven.