expect certainty of memory, after five months, as to hours of the
clock. Also James did not prove that he sent a message to Allan at
Coalisnacoan, bidding him draw on William Stewart for money; yet on
Friday, May 15, James did, by the pedlar, bid William Stewart give
Allan credit, and on Saturday, May 16, Allan did make a pen from a
bird's feather, and ink with powder and water, and write a letter for
money, on the strength of James's credit, to William Stewart. This is
certainly a difficulty for James, since he suggested John Breck
MacColl, a tenant of Appin's at Coalisnacoan, for the intermediary
between Allan and William Stewart, and Allan actually did employ this
man to carry his letter. But Allan knew this tenant well, as did
James, and there was nobody else at that desolate spot, Coalisnacoan,
whom Allan could employ. So lonely is the country that a few years ago
a gentleman of my acquaintance, climbing a rocky cliff, found the
bones of a man gnawed by foxes and eagles; a man who never had been
missed or inquired after. Remains of pencils and leather shoe strings
among the bones proved that the man had been a pedlar, like James
Stewart's messenger, who had fallen over the precipice in trying to
cross from Coalisnacoan to the road through Glencoe. But he never was
missed, nor is the date of his death known to this day.

The evidence of the lonely tenant at Coalisnacoan, as to his
interviews with Allan, is familiar to readers of _Kidnapped_. The
tenant had heard of the murder before he saw Allan. Two poor women,
who came up from Glencoe, told the story, saying that '_two men_ were
seen going from the spot where Glenure was killed, and that Allan
Breck was one of them.' Thus early does the mysterious figure of _the
other man_ haunt the evidence. The tenant's testimony was not regarded
as trustworthy by the Stewart party; it tended to prove that Allan
expected a change of clothes and money to be sent to him, and he also
wrote the letter (with a wood-pigeon's quill, and powder and water) to
William Stewart, asking for money. But Allan might do all this relying
on his own message sent by Donald Stewart, on the night of the murder,
to James of the Glens, and knowing, as he must have done, that William
Stewart was James's agent in his large financial operations.

On the whole, then, the evidence, even where it 'pinches' James most,
is by no means conclusive proof that on May 11 he had planned the
murder with Allan. If so, he must have begun to try to raise money
before the very day of the murder. James and his son were arrested on
May 16, and taken to Fort William; scores of other persons were
arrested, and the Campbells, to avenge Glenure, made the most minute
examinations of hundreds of people. Meanwhile Allan, having got 5_l._
and his French clothes by the agency of his cousin the pedlar,
decamped from Coalisnacoan in the night, and marched across country to
the house of an uncle in Rannoch. Thence he escaped to France, where
he was seen in Paris by an informant of Sir Walter Scott's in the dawn
of the French Revolution; a tall, thin, quiet old man, wearing the
cross of St. Louis, and looking on at a revolutionary procession.

The activities of the Campbells are narrated in their numerous
unpublished letters. We learn from a nephew of Glenure's that he had
been 'several days ago forewarned,' by whom we cannot guess;
tradition tells, as I have said, that he feared danger only in
Lochiel's country, Lochaber, and thought himself safe in Appin. The
warning, then, probably came from a Cameron in Lochaber, not from a
Stewart in Appin. In coincidence with this is a dark anonymous
blackmailing letter to Fassifern, as if _he_ had urged the writer to
do the deed:

'You will remember what you proposed on the night that Culchena was
buried, betwixt the hill and Culchena. I cannot deny but that I had
breathing' (a whisper), 'and not only that, but proposal of the same
to myself to do. Therefore you must excuse me, when it comes to the
push, for telling the thing that happened betwixt you and me that
night.... If you do not take this to heart, you may let it go as you
will.' (June 6, 1752.)

Fassifern, who had no hand in the murder, 'let it go,' and probably
handed the blackmailer's letter over to the Campbells. Later, ----,
---- of ----, the blackest villain in the country, offered to the
Government to accuse Fassifern of the murder. The writer of the
anonymous letter to Fassifern is styled 'Blarmachfildich,' or
'Blarmackfildoch,' in the correspondence. I think he was a Mr. Millar,
employed by Fassifern to agitate against Glenure.

In the beginning of July a man, suspected of being Allan, was arrested
at Annan on the Border, by a sergeant of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He
really seems to have changed clothes with Allan; at least he wore gay
French clothes like Allan's, but he was not that hero. Young
Ballachulish, at this time, knew that Allan was already across the
sea. Various guesses occur as to who _the other man_ was; for example,
a son of James of the Glens was suspected, so there _was_ another man.

The 'precognitions,' or private examinations of witnesses before the
trial, extended to more than seven hundred persons. It was matter of
complaint by the Stewart party that 'James Drummond's name appeared in
the list of witnesses;' this is Mr. Stevenson's James More, really
MacGregor, the son of Rob Roy, and father of Catriona, later Mrs.
David Balfour of Shaws, in _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_. 'James More's
character is reflected upon, and I believe he cannot be called worse
than he deserves,' says one of the Campbells. He alleges, however,
that in April, before the murder, James of the Glens visited James
More, then a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, 'caressed him,' and had a
private conversation with him. The abject James More averred that, in
this conversation, James of the Glens proposed that James More's
brother, Robin Oig, should kill Glenure for money. James More was not
examined at the trial of James of the Glens, perhaps because he had
already escaped, thanks to Catriona and collusion; but his evidence
appears to have reached the jury, almost all of them Campbells, who
sat at Inveraray, the Duke of Argyll on the bench, and made no
difficulty about finding James of the Glens 'Guilty.' To be sure,
James, if guilty, was guilty as an accessory to Allan, and that Allan
was guilty was not proved; he was not even before the court. It was
not proved that the bullets which slew Glenure fitted the bore of
James's small gun with which Allan was alleged to have perpetrated the
murder, but it was proved that the lock of that gun had only one
fault--it missed fire four times out of five, and, when the gun did
not miss fire, it did not carry straight--missed a blackcock, sitting!
_That_ gun was not the gun used in the murder.

The jury had the case for James of the Glens most clearly and
convincingly placed before them, in the speech of Mr. Brown for the
accused. He made, indeed, the very points on which I have insisted;
for example, that if James concerted a murder with Allan on May 11, he
would not begin to hunt for money for Allan's escape so late as May
14, the day of the murder. Again, he proved that, without any
information from James, Allan would _naturally_ send for money to
William Stewart, James's usual source of supply; while at Coalisnacoan
there was no man to go as messenger except the tenant, John Breck
MacColl. A few women composed his family, and, as John MacColl had
been the servant of James of the Glens, he was well known already to
Allan. In brief, there was literally no proof of concert, and had the
case been heard in Edinburgh, not in the heart of the Campbell
country, by a jury of Campbells, a verdict of 'Not Guilty' would have
been given: probably the jury would not even have fallen back upon
'Not Proven.' But, moved by clan hatred and political hatred, the
jury, on September 24, found a verdict against James of the Glens,
who, in a touching brief speech, solemnly asserted his innocence
before God, and chiefly regretted 'that after ages should think me
guilty of such a horrid and barbarous murder.'

He was duly hanged, and left hanging, on the little knoll above the
sea ferry, close to the Ballachulish Hotel.

And _the other man_?

Tradition avers that, on the day of the execution, he wished to give
himself up to justice, though his kinsmen told him that he could not
save James, and would merely share his fate; but, nevertheless, he
struggled so violently that his people mastered and bound him with
ropes, and laid him in a room still existing. Finally, it is said that
strange noises and knockings are still heard in that place, a
mysterious survival of strong human passions attested in other cases,
as on the supposed site of the murder of James I. of Scotland in
Perth.

Do I believe in this identification of _the other man_? I have marked
every trace of him in the documents, published or unpublished, and I
remain in doubt. But if Allan had an accessory in the crime, who was
seen at the place, an accomplice who, for example, supplied the gun,
perhaps fired the shot, while Allan fled to distract suspicion, that
accessory was probably the person named by legend. Though he was
certainly under suspicion, so were scores of other people. The crime
does not seem to me to have been the result of a conspiracy in Appin,
but the act of one hot-headed man or of two hot-headed men. I hope I
have kept the Celtic secret, and I defy anyone to discover _the other
man_ by aid of this narrative.

That James would have been quite safe with an Edinburgh jury was
proved by the almost contemporary case of the murder of the English
sergeant Davies. He was shot on the hillside, and the evidence against
the assassins was quite strong enough to convict them. But some of the
Highland witnesses averred that the phantasm of the sergeant had
appeared to them, and given information against the criminals, and
though there was testimony independent of the ghost's, his
interference threw ridicule over the affair. Moreover the Edinburgh
jury was in sympathy with Mr. Lockhart, the Jacobite advocate who
defended the accused. Though undeniably guilty, they were acquitted:
much more would James of the Glens have obtained a favourable verdict.
He was practically murdered under forms of law, and what was thought
of the Duke of Argyll's conduct on the bench is familiar to readers of
_Kidnapped_. I have never seen a copy of the pamphlet put forth after
the hanging by the Stewart party, and only know it through a reply in
the Campbell MSS.

The tragedy remains as fresh in the memories of the people of Appin
and Lochaber as if it were an affair of yesterday. The reason is that
the crime of cowardly assassination was very rare indeed among the
Highlanders. Their traditions were favourable to driving 'creaghs' of
cattle, and to clan raids and onfalls, but in the wildest regions the
traveller was far more safe than on Hounslow or Bagshot Heaths, and
shooting from behind a wall was regarded as dastardly.

V

_THE CARDINAL'S NECKLACE_

'Oh, Nature and Thackeray, which of you imitated the other?' One
inevitably thinks of the old question thus travestied, when one reads,
in the fifth edition, revised and augmented, of Monsieur
Funck-Brentano's _L'Affaire du Collier_,[10] the familiar story of
Jeanne de Valois, of Cardinal Rohan, and of the fatal diamond
necklace. Jeanne de Valois might have sat, though she probably did
not, for Becky Sharp. Her early poverty, her pride in the blood of
Valois, recall Becky's youth, and her boasts about 'the blood of the
Montmorencys.' Jeanne had her respectable friends, as Becky had the
Sedleys; like Becky, she imprudently married a heavy, unscrupulous
young officer; her expedients for living on nothing a year were
exactly those of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley; her personal charms, her fluent
tongue, her good nature, even, were those of that accomplished lady.
Finally she has her Marquis of Steyne in the wealthy, luxurious
Cardinal de Rohan; she robs him to a tune beyond the dreams of Becky,
and, incidentally, she drags to the dust the royal head of the fairest
and most unhappy of queens. Even now there seem to be people who
believe that Marie Antoinette was guilty, that she cajoled the
Cardinal, and robbed him of the diamonds, fateful as the jewels of
Eriphyle.

[Footnote 10: Hachette, Paris, 1903. The author has made valuable
additions and corrections.]

That theory is annihilated by M. Funck-Brentano. But the story is so
strangely complicated; the astuteness and the credulity of the
Cardinal are so oddly contrasted; a momentary folly of the Queen is so
astonishing and fatal; the general mismanagement of the Court is so
crazy, that, had we lived in Paris at the moment, perhaps we could
hardly have believed the Queen to be innocent. Even persons greatly
prejudiced in her favour might well have been deceived, and the people
'loveth to think the worst, and is hardly to be moved from that
opinion,' as was said of the Scottish public at the date of the Gowrie
conspiracy.

An infidelity of Henri II. of France to his wedded wife, Catherine de
Médicis, and the misplaced affection of Louis XV. for Madame du Barry,
were the remote but real causes that helped to ruin the House of
France. Without the amour of Henri II., there would have been no
Jeanne de Valois; without the hope that Louis XV. would stick at
nothing to please Madame du Barry, the diamond necklace would never
have been woven.

Henri II. loved, about 1550, a lady named Nicole de Savigny, and by
her had a son, Henri de Saint-Remy, whom he legitimated. Saint-Remy
was the great, great, great, great-grandfather of Jeanne de Valois,
the flower of minxes. Her father, a ruined man, dwelt in a corner of
the family _château_, a predacious, poaching, athletic, broken scion
of royalty, who drank and brawled with the peasants, and married his
mistress, a servant-girl. Jeanne was born at the _château_ of
Fontette, near Bar-sur-Aube, on April 22, 1756, and she and her
brother and little sister starved in their mouldering tower, kept
alive by the charity of the neighbours and of the _curé_, who begged
clothes for these descendants of kings. But their scutcheon was--and
Jeanne never forgot the fact--argent, three _fleurs de lys_ or, on a
fesse azure. The _noblesse_ of the family was later scrutinised by the
famous d'Hozier and pronounced authentic. Jeanne, with bare feet, and
straws in her hair, is said to have herded the cows, a discontented
indolent child, often beaten by her peasant mother. When her father
had eaten up his last acre, he and the family tramped to Paris in
1760. As Jeanne was then but four years old, I doubt if she ever
'drove the cattle home,' as M. Funck-Brentano finds recorded in the
MSS. of the advocate Target, who defended Jeanne's victim, Cardinal
Rohan.

The Valois crew lived in a village near Paris. Jeanne's mother turned
Jeanne's father out of doors, took a soldier in his place, and sent
the child to beg daily in the streets. 'Pity a poor orphan of the
blood of Valois,' she piped; 'alms, in God's name, for two orphans of
the blood of Valois!' When she brought home little she was cruelly
flogged, so she says, and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A
kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story,
found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went
back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence,
after she got possession of the diamonds.

By the age of twenty-one (1777), Jeanne was a pretty enchanting girl,
with a heart full of greed and envy; two years later she and her
sister fled from the convent where her protectress had placed them: a
merry society convent it was. A Madame de Surmont now gave them
shelter, at Bar-sur-Aube, and Jeanne married, very disreputably, her
heavy admirer, La Motte, calling himself Count, and to all appearance
a stupid young officer of the _gendarmerie_. The pair lived as such
people do, and again made prey of Madame de Boulainvilliers, in 1781,
at Strasbourg. The lady was here the guest of the sumptuous, vain,
credulous, but honourable Cardinal Rohan, by this time a man of fifty,
and the fanatical adorer of Cagliostro, with his philosopher's stone,
his crystal gazers, his seeresses, his Egyptian mysteries, and his
powers of healing diseases, and creating diamonds out of nothing.

Cagliostro doubtless lowered the Cardinal's moral and mental tone, but
it does not appear that he had any connection with the great final
swindle. In his supernormal gifts and graces the Cardinal did
steadfastly believe. Ten years earlier, Rohan had blessed Marie
Antoinette on her entry into France, and had been ambassador at the
Court of Maria Theresa, the Empress. A sportsman who once fired off
1,300 cartridges in a day (can this be true?), a splendid festive
churchman, who bewitched Vienna, and even the Emperor and Count
Kaunitz, by his lavish entertainments, Rohan made himself positively
loathed--for his corrupting luxury and his wicked wit--by the austere
Empress. She procured Rohan's recall, and so worked on her daughter,
Marie Antoinette, the young Queen of France, that the prelate, though
Grand Almoner, was socially boycotted by the Court, his letters of
piteous appeal to the Queen were not even opened, and his ambitions to
sway politics, like a Tencin or a Fleury, were ruined.

So here are Rohan, Cagliostro, and Jeanne all brought acquainted. The
Cardinal (and this is one of the oddest features in the affair) was to
come to believe that Jeanne was the Queen's most intimate friend, and
could and would make his fortune with her; while, at the same time, he
was actually relieving her by little tips of from two to five louis!
This he was doing, even after, confiding in Jeanne, he handed to her
the diamond necklace for the Queen, and, as he believed, had himself
a solitary midnight interview with her Majesty. If Jeanne was so great
with the Queen as Rohan supposed, how could Jeanne also be in need of
small charities? Rohan was a man of the world. His incredible
credulity seems a fact so impossible to accept that it was not
accepted by public opinion. The Queen, people could not but argue,
must have taken his enormous gifts, and then robbed and denounced him.
With the case before our eyes of Madame Humbert, who swindled scores
of hard-headed financiers by the flimsiest fables, we can no longer
deem the credulity of the Cardinal incredible, even though he
displayed on occasion a sharpness almost as miraculous as his
stupidity.

Rohan conferred a few small favours on Jeanne; her audacity was as
great as that of Madame Humbert, and, late in 1781, she established
herself both at Paris and in Versailles. The one card in her hand was
the blood of the Valois, and for long she could not play it to any
purpose. Her claims were too old and musty. If a lady of the name of
Stewart were to appear to-day, able to prove that she was of royal
blood, as being descended from Francis, Earl of Bothwell (who used to
kidnap James VI., was forfeited, and died in exile about 1620), she
could not reasonably expect to be peculiarly cherished and comforted
by our royal family. Now Jeanne's claims were no better, and no
nearer, in 1781, than those of our supposed Stewart adventuress in
1904. But Jeanne was sanguine. Something must be done, by hook or by
crook, for the blood of the Valois. She must fasten on her great
relations, the royal family. By 1783 Jeanne was pawning her furniture
and dining at the expense of her young admirers, or of her servants,
for, somehow, they were attached to a mistress who did not pay their
wages. She bought goods on her credit as a countess, and sold them on
the same day. She fainted in the crowd at Versailles, and Madame
Elizabeth sent her a few louis, and had her tiny pension doubled.
Jeanne fainted again under the eyes of the Queen, who never noticed
her.

Her plan was to persuade small suitors that she could get them what
they wanted by her backstairs influence with her royal cousin; she had
a lover, Retaux de Villette, who was an expert forger, and by April
1784, relying on his skill, she began to hint to Rohan that she could
win for him the Queen's forgiveness. Her Majesty had seen her faint
and had been full of kindness. Nothing should be refused to the
interesting daughter of the Valois. Letters from the Queen to Jeanne,
forged by Villette on paper stamped with blue _fleurs de lys_, were
laid before the eyes of the infatuated prelate. Villette later
confessed to his forgeries; all confessed; but as all recanted their
confessions, this did not impress the public. The letters proved that
the Queen was relenting, as regarded Rohan. Cagliostro confirmed the
fact. At a _séance_ in Rohan's house, he introduced a niece of
Jeanne's husband, a girl of fifteen, who played the part of crystal
gazer, and saw, in the crystal, whatever Cagliostro told her to see.
All was favourable to the wishes of Rohan, who was as easy of belief
as any spiritualist, being entirely dominated by the Neapolitan.
Cagliostro, none the less, knew nothing of the great final _coup_,
despite his clairvoyance.

So far, in the summer of 1784, the great diamond fraud had not risen
into Jeanne's consciousness. Her aim was merely to convince the
Cardinal that she could win for him the Queen's favour, and then to
work upon his gratitude. It was in July 1784 that Jeanne's husband
made the acquaintance of Marie Laguay, a pretty and good-humoured but
quite 'unfortunate' young woman--'the height of honesty and
dissoluteness'--who might be met in the public gardens, chaperoned
solely by a nice little boy. Jeanne de Valois was not of a jealous
temperament. Mademoiselle Laguay was the friend of her husband, the
tawdry Count. For Jeanne that was enough. She invited the young lady
to her house, and by her royal fantasy created her Baronne Gay d'Oliva
(_Valoi_, an easy anagram).

She presently assured the Baronne that the Queen desired her
collaboration in a practical joke, her Majesty would pay 600_l._ for
the freak. This is the Baronne's own version; her innocence, she
averred, readily believed that Marie Antoinette desired her
assistance.

'You are only asked to give, some evening, a note and a rose to a
great lord, in an alley of the gardens of Versailles. My husband will
bring you hither to-morrow evening.'

Jeanne later confessed that the Baronne really was stupid enough to be
quite satisfied that the whole affair was a jest.

Judged by their portraits, d'Oliva, who was to personate the Queen, in
an interview with the Cardinal, was not at all like Marie Antoinette.
Her short, round, buxom face bears no resemblance to the long and
noble outlines of the features of the Queen. But both women were fair,
and of figures not dissimilar. On August 11, 1784, Jeanne dressed up
d'Oliva in the _chemise_ or _gaulle_, the very simple white blouse
which Marie Antoinette wears in the contemporary portrait by Madame
Vigée-Lebrun, a portrait exhibited at the Salon of 1783. The ladies,
with La Motte, then dined at the best restaurant in Versailles, and
went out into the park. The sky was heavy, without moon or starlight,
and they walked into the sombre mass of the Grove of Venus, so styled
from a statue of the goddess which was never actually placed there.
Nothing could be darker than the thicket below the sullen sky.

A shadow of a man appeared: _Vous voilà!_ said the Count, and the
shadow departed. It was Villette, the forger of the Queen's letters,
the lover and accomplice of Jeanne de Valois.

Then the gravel of a path crackled under the feet of three men. One
approached, heavily cloaked. D'Oliva was left alone, a rose fell from
her hand, she had a letter in her pocket which she forgot to give to
the cloaked man, who knelt, and kissed the skirt of her dress. She
murmured something; the cloaked Cardinal heard, or thought he heard,
her say: 'You may hope that the past is forgotten.'

Another shadow flitted past, whispering: 'Quick! Quick! Come on! Here
are Madame and Madame d'Artois!'

They dispersed. Later the Cardinal recognised the whispering shadow
that fled by, in Villette, the forger. How could he recognise a
fugitive shade vaguely beheld in a dark wood, on a sultry and starless
night? If he mistook the girl d'Oliva for the Queen, what is his
recognition of the shadow worth?

The conspirators had a jolly supper, and one Beugnot, a friend of
Jeanne, not conscious of the plot, escorted the Baronne d'Oliva back
to her rooms in Paris.

The trick, the transparent trick was played, and Jeanne could extract
from the Cardinal what money she wanted, in the name of the Queen that
gave him a rose in the Grove of Venus. Letters from the Queen were
administered at intervals by Jeanne, and the prelate never dreamed of
comparing them with the authentic handwriting of Marie Antoinette.

We naturally ask ourselves, was Rohan in love with the daughter of the
Valois? Does his passion account for his blindness? Most authors have
believed what Jeanne later proclaimed, that she was the Cardinal's
mistress. This the divine steadily denied. There was no shadow of
proof that they were even on familiar terms, except a number of erotic
letters, which Jeanne showed to a friend, Beugnot, saying that they
were from the Cardinal, and then burned. The Cardinal believed all
things, in short, and verified nothing, in obedience to his dominating
idea--the recovery of the Queen's good graces.

Meanwhile, Jeanne drew on him for large sums, which the Queen, she
said, needed for acts of charity. It was proved that Jeanne instantly
invested the money in her own name, bought a large house with another
loan, and filled it with splendid furniture. She was as extravagant as
she was greedy; _alieni appetens, sui profusa_.

The Cardinal was in Alsace, at his bishopric, when in
November-December 1784, Jeanne was brought acquainted with the
jewellers, Böhmer and Bassenge, who could not find a customer for
their enormous and very hideous necklace of diamonds, left on their
hands by the death of Louis XV. The European Courts were poor; Marie
Antoinette had again and again refused to purchase a bauble like a
'comforter' made of precious stones, or to accept it from the King.
'We have more need of a ship of war,' she said, and would not buy,
though the jeweller fell on his knees, and threatened to drown
himself. There were then no American millionaires, and the thickest
and ugliest of necklaces was 'eating its head off,' for the stones had
been bought with borrowed money.

In the jewellers Jeanne found new victims; they, too, believed in her
credit with the Queen; they, too, asked no questions, and held that
she could find them a purchaser. Jeanne imposed on them thus, while
the Cardinal was still in Alsace. He arrived at Paris in January 1785.
He learned, from Jeanne, that the Queen wished him to deal for her
with the jewellers! She would pay the price, 60,000_l._, by quarterly
instalments.

The Cardinal could believe that the Queen, who, as he supposed, had
given him a darkling interview, would entrust him with such a
commission, for an article which she had notoriously refused. But
there is a sane spot in every man's mind, and on examining the
necklace (January 24, 1785), he said that it was in very poor taste.
However, as the Queen wanted to wear it at a ceremony on February 2,
he arranged the terms, and became responsible for the money. His
guarantee was a document produced by Jeanne, and signed 'Marie
Antoinette de France.' As Cagliostro pointed out to Rohan later, too
late, the Queen could not possibly use this signature. Neither the
prelate nor the tradesmen saw the manifest absurdity. Rohan carried
the necklace to Jeanne, who gave it to the alleged messenger of the
Queen. Rohan only saw the _silhouette_ of this man, in a dusky room,
through a glass door, but he later declared that in him he recognised
the fleeting shade who whispered the warning to fly, in the dark Grove
of Venus. It was Villette, the forger.

Naturally people asked, 'If you could not tell the Queen from Mlle.
d'Oliva when you kissed her robe in the grove, how could you
recognise, through a dim glass door, the man of whom you had only
caught a glimpse as a fleeting shadow? If you are so clever, why, it
_was_ the Queen whom you met in the wood. You cannot have been
mistaken in her.'

These obvious arguments told against the Queen as well as against the
Cardinal.

The Queen did not wear the jewels at the feast for which she had
wanted them. Strange to say, she never wore them at all, to the
surprise of the vendors and of the Cardinal. The necklace was, in
fact, hastily cut to pieces with a blunt heavy knife, in Jeanne's
house; her husband crossed to England, and sold many stones, and
bartered more for all sorts of trinkets, to Grey, of New Bond Street,
and Jeffreys, of Piccadilly. Villette had already been arrested with
his pockets full of diamonds, but the luck of the House of Valois, and
the astuteness of Jeanne, procured his release. So the diamonds were,
in part, 'dumped down' in England; many were kept by the La Mottes;
and Jeanne paid some pressing debts in diamonds.

The happy La Mottes, with six carriages, a stud of horses, silver
plate of great value, and diamonds glittering on many portions of
their raiment, now went off to astonish their old friends at
Bar-sur-Aube. The inventories of their possessions read like pages out
of _The Arabian Nights_. All went merrily, till at a great
ecclesiastical feast, among her friends the aristocracy, on August 17,
1785, Jeanne learned that the Cardinal had been arrested at
Versailles, in full pontificals, when about to celebrate the Mass. She
rushed from table, fled to Versailles, and burned her papers. She
would not fly to England; she hoped to brazen out the affair.

The arrest of the Cardinal was caused thus: On July 12, 1785, the
jeweller, Böhmer, went to Versailles with a letter of thanks to the
Queen, dictated by Rohan. The date for the payment of the first
instalment had arrived, nothing had been paid, a reduction in price
had been suggested and accepted. Böhmer gave the letter of thanks to
the Queen, but the Controller-General entered, and Böhmer withdrew,
without waiting for a reply. The Queen presently read the letter of
thanks, could not understand it, and sent for the jeweller, who had
gone home. Marie Antoinette thought he was probably mad, certainly a
bore, and burned his note before the eyes of Madame Campan.

'Tell the man, when you next see him, that I do not want diamonds, and
shall never buy any more.'

Fatal folly! Had the Queen insisted on seeing Böhmer, all would have
been cleared up, and her innocence established. Böhmer's note spoke of
the recent arrangements, of the jeweller's joy that the greatest of
queens possesses the handsomest of necklaces--and Marie Antoinette
asked no questions!

Jeanne now (August 3) did a great stroke. She told Bassenge that the
Queen's guarantee to the Cardinal was a forgery. She calculated that
the Cardinal, to escape the scandal, would shield her, would sacrifice
himself and pay the 60,000_l._

But the jewellers dared not carry the news to the Cardinal. They went
to Madame Campan, who said that they had been gulled: the Queen had
never received the jewels. Still, they did not tell the Cardinal.
Jeanne now sent Villette out of the way, to Geneva, and on August 4
Bassenge asked the Cardinal whether he was sure that the man who was
to carry the jewels to the Queen had been honest? A pleasant question!
The Cardinal kept up his courage; all was well, he could not be
mistaken. Jeanne, with cunning audacity, did not fly: she went to her
splendid home at Bar-sur-Aube.

Villette was already out of reach; d'Oliva, with her latest lover, was
packed off to Brussels; there was no proof against Jeanne; her own
flight would have been proof. The Cardinal could not denounce her; he
had insulted the Queen by supposing that she gave him a lonely
midnight tryst, a matter of high treason; the Cardinal could not
speak. He consulted Cagliostro. 'The guarantee is forged,' said the
sage; 'the Queen could not sign "Marie Antoinette de France." Throw
yourself at the King's feet, and confess all.' The wretched Rohan now
compared the Queen's forged notes to him with authentic letters of
hers in the possession of his family. The forgery was conspicuous, but
he did not follow the advice of Cagliostro. On August 12, the Queen
extracted the whole facts, as far as known to them, from the
jewellers. On August 15, the day of the Assumption, when the Cardinal
was to celebrate, the King asked him: 'My cousin, what is this tale of
a diamond necklace bought by you in the name of the Queen?'

The unhappy man, unable to speak coherently, was allowed to write the
story, in fifteen lines.

'How could you believe,' asked the Queen with angry eyes, 'that I, who
have not spoken to you for eight years, entrusted you with this
commission?'

How indeed could he believe it?

He offered to pay for the jewels. The thing might still have been
hushed up. The King is blamed, first for publicly arresting Rohan as
he did, an enormous scandal; next for handing over the case, for
public trial, to the Parlement, the hereditary foes of the Court.
Fréteau de Saint-Just, one of the Bar, cried: 'What a triumph for
Liberal ideas! A Cardinal a thief! The Queen implicated! Mud on the
crosier and the sceptre!'

He had his fill of Liberal ideas, for he was guillotined on June 14,
1794!

Kings and queens are human beings. They like a fair and open trial.
Mary Stuart prayed for it in vain, from the Estates of Scotland, and
from Elizabeth. Charles I. asked for public trial in vain, from the
Estates of Scotland, at the time of the unsolved puzzle of 'The
Incident.' Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette had the publicity they
wanted; to their undoing. The Parlement was to acquit Rohan of the
theft of the necklace (a charge which Jeanne tried to support by a
sub-plot of romantic complexity), and that acquittal was just. But
nothing was said of the fatal insult which he had dealt to the Queen.
Villette, who had forged the royal name, was merely exiled, left free
to publish fatal calumnies abroad, though high treason, as times went,
was about the measure of his crime. Gay d'Oliva, whose personation of
the Queen also verged on treason, was merely acquitted with a
recommendation 'not to do it again.' Pretty, a young mother, and
profoundly dissolute, she was the darling of Liberal and _sensible_
hearts.

Jeanne de Valois, indeed, was whipped and branded, but Jeanne, in
public opinion, was the scapegoat of a cruel princess, and all the mud
was thrown on the face of the guiltless Queen. The friends of Rohan
were all the clergy, all the many nobles of his illustrious house, all
the courtly foes of the Queen (they began by the basest calumnies,
the ruin that the people achieved), all the friends of Liberal ideas,
who soon, like Fréteau de Saint-Just, had more of Liberalism than they
liked.

These were the results which the King obtained by offering to the
Cardinal his choice between the royal verdict and that of the public
Court of Justice. Rohan said that, if the King would pronounce him
innocent, he would prefer to abide by the royal decision. He _was_
innocent of all but being a presumptuous fool; the King might, even
now, have recognised the fact. Mud would have been thrown, but not all
the poached filth of the streets of Paris. On the other hand, had
Louis withheld the case from public trial, we might still be doubtful
of the Queen's innocence. Napoleon acknowledged it: 'The Queen was
innocent, and to make her innocence the more public, she wished the
Parlement to be the judge. The result was that she was taken to be
guilty.' Napoleon thought that the King should have taken the case
into his own hand. This might have been wisdom for the day, but not
for securing the verdict of posterity. The pyramidal documents of the
process, still in existence, demonstrate the guilt of the La Mottes
and their accomplices at every step, and prove the stainless character
of the Queen.

La Motte could not be caught. He had fled to Edinburgh, where he lived
with an aged Italian teacher of languages. This worthy man offered to
sell him for 10,000_l._, and a pretty plot was arranged by the French
ambassador to drug La Motte, put him on board a collier at South
Shields and carry him to France. But the old Italian lost heart, and,
after getting 1,000_l._ out of the French Government in advance,
deemed it more prudent to share the money with the Count. Perhaps the
Count invented the whole stratagem; it was worthy of the husband and
pupil of Jeanne de Valois. That poor lady's cause was lost when
Villette and Gay d'Oliva were brought back across the frontier,
confessed, and corroborated each other's stories. Yet she made a
wonderfully good fight, changing her whole defence into another as
plausible and futile, before the very eyes of the Court, and doing her
best to ruin Rohan as a thief, and Cagliostro as the forger of the
Queen's guarantee. The bold Neapolitan was acquitted, but compelled to
leave the country, and attempt England, where the phlegmatic islanders
trusted him no more than they trusted Madame Humbert. We expended our
main capital of credulity on Titus Oates and Bedloe, and the
warming-pan lie--our imaginative innocence being most accessible in
the region of religion. The French are more open to the appeal of
romance, and to dissolute honesty in the person of Miss Gay d'Oliva,
to injured innocence as represented by Jeanne de Valois. That class of
rogues suits a gay people, while we are well mated with such a
seductive divine as Dr. Oates.

VI

_THE MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER: THE CHILD OF EUROPE_

The story of Kaspar Hauser, a boy, apparently idiotic, who appeared,
as if from the clouds, in Nuremberg (1828), divided Germany into
hostile parties, and caused legal proceedings as late as 1883. Whence
this lad came, and what his previous adventures had been, has never
been ascertained. His death by a dagger-wound, in 1833--whether
inflicted by his own hand or that of another--deepened the mystery.
According to one view, the boy was only a waif and an impostor, who
had strayed from some peasant home, where nobody desired his return.
According to the other theory, he was the Crown Prince of Baden,
stolen as an infant in the interests of a junior branch of the House,
reduced to imbecility by systematic ill-treatment, turned loose on the
world at the age of sixteen, and finally murdered, lest his secret
origin might be discovered.

I state first the theory of the second party in the dispute, which
believed that Kaspar was some great one: I employ language as
romantic as my vocabulary affords.

Darkness in Karlsruhe! 'Tis the high noon of night: October 15, 1812.
Hark to the tread of the Twelve Hours as they pass on the palace
clock, and join their comrades that have been! The vast corridors are
still; in the shadows lurk two burly minions of ambitious crime,
Burkard and Sauerbeck. Is that a white moving shadow which approaches
through the gloom? There arises a shriek, a heavy body falls, 'tis a
lacquey who has seen and recognised _The White Lady of the Grand Ducal
House_, that walks before the deaths of Princes. Burkard and Sauerbeck
spurn the inanimate body of the menial witness. The white figure,
bearing in her arms a sleeping child, glides to the tapestried wall,
and vanishes through it, into the Chamber of the Crown Prince, a babe
of fourteen days. She returns carrying _another_ unconscious infant
form, she places it in the hands of the ruffian Sauerbeck, she
disappears. The miscreant speeds with the child through a postern into
the park, you hear the trample of four horses, and the roll of the
carriage on the road. Next day there is silence in the palace, broken
but by the shrieks of a bereaved though Royal (or at least Grand
Ducal) mother. Her babe lies a corpse! The Crown Prince has died in
the night! The path to the throne lies open to the offspring of the
Countess von Hochberg, morganatic wife of the reigning Prince, Karl
Friedrich, and mother of the children of Ludwig Wilhelm August, his
youngest son.

Sixteen years fleet by; years rich in Royal crimes. 'Tis four of a
golden Whit Monday afternoon, in old Nuremberg, May 26, 1828. The town
lies empty, dusty, silent; her merry people are rejoicing in the green
wood, and among the suburban beer-gardens. One man alone, a shoemaker,
stands by the door of his house in the Unschlitt Plas: around him lie
the vacant streets of the sleeping city. His eyes rest on the form,
risen as it were out of the earth or fallen from the skies, of a boy,
strangely clad, speechless, incapable either of standing erect or of
moving his limbs. That boy is the Royal infant placed of yore by the
White Shadow in the hands of the cloaked ruffian. Thus does the Crown
Prince of Baden return from the darkness to the daylight! He names
himself KASPAR HAUSER. He is to die by the dagger of a cruel courtier,
or of a hireling English Earl.

Thus briefly, and, I trust, impressively, have I sketched the history
of Kaspar Hauser, 'the Child of Europe,' as it was presented by
various foreign pamphleteers, and, in 1892, by Miss Elizabeth E.
Evans.[11] But, as for the 'authentic records' on which the partisans
of Kaspar Hauser based their version, they are anonymous,
unauthenticated, discredited by the results of a libel action in
1883; and, in short, are worthless and impudent rubbish.

[Footnote 11: _The Story of Kaspar Hauser from Authentic Records._
Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1892.]

On all sides, indeed, the evidence as to Kaspar Hauser is in
bewildering confusion. In 1832, four years after his appearance, a
book about him was published by Paul John Anselm Von Feuerbach. The
man was mortal, had been a professor, and, though a legal reformer and
a learned jurist, was 'a nervous invalid' when he wrote, and he soon
after died of paralysis (or poison according to Kasparites). He was
approaching a period of life in which British judges write books to
prove that Bacon was Shakespeare, and his arguments were like theirs.
His _Kaspar Hauser_ is composed in a violently injudicial style. 'To
seek the giant perpetrator of such a crime' (as the injustice to
Kaspar), 'it would be necessary ... to be in possession of Joshua's
ram's horns, or at least of Oberon's horn, in order, for some time at
least, to suspend the activity of the powerful enchanted Colossi that
guard the golden gates of certain castles,' that is, of the palace at
Karlsruhe. Such early Nuremberg records of Kaspar's first exploits as
existed were ignored by Feuerbach, who told Lord Stanhope, that any
reader of these 'would conceive Kaspar to be an impostor.' 'They ought
to be burned.' The records, which were read and in part published, by
the younger Meyer (son of one of Kaspar's tutors) and by President
Karl Schmausz, have disappeared, and, in 1883, Schmausz could only
attest the general accuracy of Meyer's excerpts from the town's
manuscripts.

Taking Feuerbach's romantic narrative of 1832, we find him averring
that, about 4.30 P.M. on Whit Monday, May 26, 1828, a citizen,
unnamed, was loitering at his door, in the Unschlitt Plas, Nuremberg,
intending to sally out by the New Gate, when he saw a young peasant,
standing in an attitude suggestive of intoxication, and apparently
suffering from locomotor ataxia, 'unable to govern fully the movements
of his legs.' The citizen went to the boy, who showed him a letter
directed to the captain of a cavalry regiment. The gallant captain
lived near the New Gate (654 paces from the citizen's house), and
thither the young peasant walked with the citizen. So he _could_
'govern fully the movements of his legs.' At the house, the captain
being out, the boy said, 'I would be a horseman as my father was,'
also 'Don't know.' Later he was taken to the prison, up a steep hill,
and the ascent to his room was one of over ninety steps. Thus he could
certainly walk, and when he spoke of himself he said 'I' like other
people. Later he took to speaking of himself as 'Kaspar,' in the
manner of small children, and some hysterical patients under
hypnotism. But this was an after-thought, for Kaspar's line came to be
that he had only learned a few words, like a parrot, words which he
used to express all senses indifferently. His eye-sight, when he first
appeared, seems to have been normal, at the prison he wrote his own
name as 'Kaspar Hauser,' and covered a sheet of paper with writing.
Later he could see best in the dark.

So says Feuerbach, in 1832. What he does not say is whence he got his
information as to Kaspar's earliest exploits. Now our earliest
evidence, on oath, before a magistrate, is dated November 4, 1829.
George Weichmann, shoemaker (Feuerbach's anonymous 'citizen'), then
swore that, on May 26, 1828, he saw Kaspar, not making paralysed
efforts to walk, but trudging down a hilly street, shouting 'Hi!' ('or
any loud cry'), and presently asking, 'with tolerable distinctness,'
'New Gate Street?' He took the boy that way, and the boy gave him the
letter for the captain. Weichmann said that they had better ask for
him at the New Gate Guard House, and the boy said 'Guard House? Guard
House? New Gate no doubt just built?' He said he came from Ratisbon,
and was in Nuremberg for the first time, but clearly did not
understand what Weichmann meant when he inquired as to the chances of
war breaking out. In May 1834 Weichmann repeated his evidence as to
Kaspar's power of talking and walking, and was corroborated by one
Jacob Beck, not heard of in 1829. On December 20, 1829, Merk, the
captain's servant, spoke to Kaspar's fatigue, 'he reeled as he
walked,' and would answer no questions. In 1834 Merk expanded, and
said 'we had a long chat.' Kaspar averred that he could read and
write, and had crossed the frontier daily on his way to school. 'He
did not know where he came from.' Certainly Merk, in 1834, remembered
much more than in 1829. Whether he suppressed facts in 1829, or, in
1834, invented fables, we do not know. The cavalry captain (November
2, 1829) remembered several intelligent remarks made by Kaspar. His
dress was new and clean (denied by Feuerbach), he was tired and
footsore. The evidence of the police, taken in 1834, was remote in
time, but went to prove that Kaspar's eyesight and power of writing
were normal. Feuerbach absolutely discredits all the sworn evidence of
1829, without giving his own sources. The early evidence shows that
Kaspar could both walk and talk, and see normally, by artificial and
natural light, all of which is absolutely inconsistent with Kaspar's
later account of himself.

The personal property of Kaspar was a horn rosary, and several
Catholic tracts with prayers to the Guardian Angel, and so forth.
Feuerbach holds that these were furnished by 'devout villains'--a very
sound Protestant was Feuerbach--and that Kaspar was ignorant of the
being of a Deity, at least of a Protestant Deity. The letter carried
by the boy said that the writer first took charge of him, as an
infant, in 1812, and had never let him 'take a single step out of my
house.... I have already taught him to read and write, _and he writes
my handwriting exactly as I do_.' In the same hand was a letter in
Latin characters, purporting to come from Kaspar's mother, 'a poor
girl,' as the author of the German letter was 'a poor day-labourer.'
Humbug as I take Kaspar to have been, I am not sure that he wrote
these pieces. If not, somebody else was in the affair; somebody who
wanted to get rid of Kaspar. As that youth was an useless, false,
convulsionary, and hysterical patient, no one was likely to want to
keep him, if he could do better. No specified reward was offered at
the time for information about Kaspar; no portrait of him was then
published and circulated. The Burgomaster, Binder, had a portrait, and
a facsimile of Kaspar's signature engraved, but Feuerbach would not
allow them to be circulated, heaven knows why.

How Kaspar fell, as it were from the clouds, and unseen, into the
middle of Nuremberg, even on a holiday when almost every one was out
of town, is certainly a puzzle. The earliest witnesses took him for a
journeyman tailor lad (he was about sixteen), and perhaps nobody paid
any attention to a dusty travelling tradesman, or groom out of place.
Feuerbach (who did not see Kaspar till July) says that his feet were
covered with blisters, the gaoler says that they were merely swollen
by the tightness of his boots.

Once in prison, Kaspar, who asked to be taken home, adopted the _rôle_
of 'a semi-unconscious animal,' playing with toy horses, 'blind though
he saw,' yet, not long after, he wrote a minute account of all that he
had then observed. He could only eat bread and water: meat made him
shudder, and Lord Stanhope says that this peculiarity did occur in the
cases of some peasant soldiers. He had no sense of hearing, which
means, perhaps, that he did not think of pretending to be amazed by
the sound of church bells till he had been in prison for some days.
Till then he had been deaf to their noise. This is Feuerbach's story,
but we shall see that it is contradicted by Kaspar himself, in
writing. Thus the alleged facts may be explained without recourse even
to a theory of intermittent deafness. Kaspar was no more deaf than
blind. He 'was all there,' and though, ten days after his arrival, he
denied that he had ever seen Weichmann, in ten days more his memory
for faces was deemed extraordinary, and he minutely described all
that, on May 26 and later, he had observed. Kaspar was taught to write
by the gaoler's little boy, though he could write when he came--in the
same hand as the author of his mysterious letter. Though he had but
half a dozen words on May 26, according to Feuerbach, by July 7 he had
furnished Binder with his history--pretty quick work! Later in 1828 he
was able to write that history himself. In 1829 he completed a work of
autobiography.

Kaspar wrote that till the age of sixteen he was kept in 'a prison,'
'perhaps six or seven feet long, four broad, and five high.' There
were two small windows, with closed black wooden shutters. He lay on
straw, lived on bread and water, and played with toy horses, and blue
and red ribbons. That he could see colours in total darkness is a
proof of his inconsistent fables, or of his 'hyperæsthesia'--abnormal
acuteness of the senses. 'The man' who kept him was not less
hyperæsthetic, for he taught Kaspar to write in the dark. He never
heard any noise, but avers that, in prison, he was alarmed by the town
clock striking, on the first morning, though Feuerbach says that he
did not hear the bells for several days.

Such is Kaspar's written account (1829); the published account of July
1828, derived from 'the expressions of a half-dumb animal' (as
Feuerbach puts it), is much more prolix and minute in detail. The
animal said that he had sat on the ground, and never seen daylight,
till he came to Nuremberg. He used to be hocussed with water of an
evil taste, and wake in a clean shirt. 'The man' once hit him and hurt
him, for making too much noise. The man taught him his letters and the
Arabic numerals. Later he gave him instructions in the art of
standing. Next he took him out, and taught him about nine words. He
was made by the man to walk he knew not how far, or how long, the man
leading him. Nobody saw this extraordinary pair on the march.
Feuerbach, who maintains that Kaspar's feet were covered with cruel
blisters, from walking, also supposes that 'perhaps for the greater
part of the way' he was carried in a carriage or waggon! Whence then
the cruel blisters caused by walking? There is medical evidence that
his legs were distorted by confinement, but the medical _post-mortem_
evidence says that this was not the case. He told Binder that his
windows were shuttered: he told Hiltel, the gaoler, that from his
windows he saw 'a pile of wood and above it the top of a tree.'

Obviously Kaspar's legends about himself, whether spoken in June 1828,
or written in February 1829, are absurdly false. He was for three
weeks in the tower, and was daily visited by the curious. Yet in these
three weeks the half-conscious animal 'learned to read tolerably well,
to count, to write figures' (_that_ he could do when he arrived,
Feuerbach says), 'he made progress in writing a good hand, and learned
a simple tune on the harpsichord,' pretty well for a half-unconscious
animal.

In July 1828, after being adopted by the excited town of Nuremberg, he
was sent to be educated by and live with a schoolmaster named Daumer,
and was studied by Feuerbach. They found, in Kaspar, a splendid
example of the 'sensitive,' and a noble proof of the powers of 'animal
magnetism.' In Germany, at this time, much was talked and written
about 'somnambulism' (the hypnotic state), and about a kind of 'animal
magnetism' which, in accordance with Mesmer's theory, was supposed to
pass between stars, metals, magnets, and human beings. The effects
produced on the patient by the hypnotist (now ascribed to
'suggestion') were attributed to a 'magnetic efflux,' and
Reichenbach's subjects saw strange currents flowing from metals and
magnets. His experiments have never, perhaps, been successfully
repeated, though hysterical persons have pretended to feel the
traditional effects, even when non-magnetic objects were pointed at
them. Now Kaspar was really a 'sensitive,' or feigned to be one, with
hysterical cunning. Anything unusual would throw him into convulsions,
or reduce him to unconsciousness. He was addicted to the tears of
sensibility. Years later Meyer read to him an account of the Noachian
Deluge, and he wept bitterly. Meyer thought this rather too much, the
Deluge being so remote an event, and, after that, though Meyer read
pathetic things in his best manner, Kaspar remained unmoved. He wrote
a long account of his remarkable magnetic sensations during and before
the first thunderstorm after his arrival at Nuremberg. Yet, before his
appearance there, he must have heard plenty of thunderstorms, though
he pretended that this was his first. The sight of the moon produced
in him 'emotions of horror.' He had visions, like the Rev. Ansel
Bourne, later to be described, of a beautiful male figure in a white
garment, who gave him a garland. He was taken to a 'somnambulist,' and
felt 'magnetic' pulls and pushes, and a strong current of air. Indeed
the tutor, Daumer, shared these sensations, obviously by virtue of
'suggestion.' They are out of fashion, the doctrine of animal
magnetism being as good as exploded, and nobody feels pulled or pushed
or blown upon, when he consults Mrs. Piper or any other 'medium.'

From a letter of Feuerbach of September 20, 1828, we learn that
Kaspar, '_without being an albino_,' can see as well in utter darkness
as in daylight. Perhaps the man who taught Kaspar to write, in the
dark, _was_ an albino: Kaspar never saw his face. Kaspar's powers of
vision abated, as he took to beef, but he remained hyperæsthetic, and
could see better in a bad light than Daumer or Feuerbach. Some
'dowsers,' we know, can detect subterranean water, by the sensations
of their hands, without using a twig, or divining rod, and others can
'spot' gold hidden under the carpet, with the twig. Kaspar, merely
with the bare hand, detected (without touching it?) a needle under a
table cloth. He gradually lost these gifts, and the theory seems to
have been that they were the result of his imprisonment in the dark,
and a proof of it. The one thing certain is that Kaspar had the
sensitive or 'mediumistic' temperament, which usually--though not
always--is accompanied by hysteria, while hysteria means cunning and
fraud, whether conscious or not so conscious. Meanwhile the boy was in
the hands of men credulous, curious, and, in the case of Daumer,
capable of odd sensations induced by suggestion. From such a boy, in
such company, the truth could not be expected, above all if, like some
other persons of his class, he was subject to 'dissociation' and
obliviousness as to his own past.

Rather curiously we find in Feuerbach's own published collection of
Trials the case of a boy, Sörgel, who had 'paroxysms of second
consciousness ... of which he was ignorant upon returning to his
ordinary state of consciousness.' We have also the famous case of the
atheistic carpenter, Ansel Bourne, who was struck deaf, dumb, and
blind, and miraculously healed, in a dissenting chapel, to the great
comfort of 'a large and warm congregation.' Mr. Bourne then became a
preacher, but later forgot who he was, strolled to a distant part of
the States, called himself Browne, set up a 'notions store,' and, one
day, awoke among his notions to the consciousness that he was Bourne,
not Browne, a preacher, not a dealer in cheap futilities. Bourne was
examined, under hypnotism, by Professor William James and others.[12]

[Footnote 12: _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_,
vol. vii. pp. 221-257.]

Many such instances of 'ambulatory automatism' are given. In my view,
Kaspar was, to put it mildly, an ambulatory automatist, who had
strayed away, like the Rev. Mr. Bourne, from some place where nobody
desired his return: rather his lifelong absence was an object of hope.
The longer Kaspar lived, the more frequently was he detected in every
sort of imposture that could make him notorious, or enable him to
shirk work.

Kaspar had for months been the pet mystery of Nuremberg. People were
sure that, like the mysterious prisoner of Pignerol, Les Exiles, and
the Isle Sainte-Marguerite (1669-1703?), Kaspar was some great one,
'kept out of his own.' Now the prisoner of Pignerol was really a
valet, and Kaspar was a peasant. Some thought him a son of Napoleon:
others averred (as we saw) that he was the infant son of the Grand
Duke Karl of Baden, born in 1812, who had not died within a fortnight
of his birth, but been spirited away by a lady disguised as the
spectral 'White Lady of Baden,' an aristocratic _ban-shie_. The subtle
conspirators had bred the Grand Duke Kaspar in a dark den, the theory
ran, hoping that he would prove, by virtue of such education, an
acceptable recruit for the Bavarian cavalry, and that no questions
would be asked. Unluckily questions were now being asked, for a boy
who could only occasionally see and hear was not (though he could
smell a cemetery at a distance of five hundred yards), an useful man
on a patrol, at least the military authorities thought not. Had they
known that Kaspar could see in the dark, they might have kept him as a
guide in night attacks, but they did not know. The promising young
hussar (he rode well but clumsily) was thus left in the hands of
civilians: the Grand Ducal secret might be discovered, so an assassin
was sent to take off the young prince.

The wonder was not unnaturally expressed that Kaspar had not smelled
out the villain, especially as he was probably the educational
albino, who taught him to write in the dark. On hearing of this,
later, Kaspar told Lord Stanhope that he _had_ smelled the man:
however, he did not mention this at the time. To make a long story
short, on October 17, 1829, Kaspar did not come to midday eating, but
was found weltering in his gore, in the cellar of Daumer's house.
Being offered refreshment in a cup, he bit out a piece of the
porcelain and swallowed it. He had 'an inconsiderable wound' on the
forehead; to that extent the assassin had effected his purpose.
Feuerbach thinks that the murderer had made a shot at Kaspar's throat
with a razor, that Kaspar ducked cleverly, and got it on the brow, and
that the assassin believed his crime to be consummated, and fled,
after uttering words in which Kaspar recognised the voice of his
tutor, the possible albino. No albino or other suspicious character
was observed. Herr Daumer, before this cruel outrage, had remarked, in
Kaspar, 'a highly regrettable tendency to dissimulation and
untruthfulness,' and, just before the attack, had told the pupil that
he was a humbug. Lord Stanhope quoted a paper of Daumer's in the
_Universal Gazette_ of February 6, 1834 (_Allgemeine Zeitung_), in
which he says that 'lying and deceit were become to Kaspar a second
nature.' When did they begin to become a second nature? In any case
Daumer clove to the romantic theory of Kaspar's origin. Kaspar left
Daumer's house and stayed with various good people, being accompanied
by a policeman in his walks. He was sent to school, and Feuerbach
bitterly complains that he was compelled to study the Latin grammar,
'and finally even Cæsar's Commentaries!' Like other boys, Kaspar
protested that he 'did not see the use of Latin,' and indeed many of
our modern authors too obviously share Kaspar's indifference to the
dead languages. He laughed, in 1831, says Feuerbach, at the popish
superstition 'of his early attendants' (we only hear of one, and about
_his_ theological predilections we learn nothing), and he also laughed
at ghosts. In his new homes Kaspar lied terribly, was angry when
detected, and wounded himself--he said accidentally--with a pistol,
after being reproached for shirking the Commentaries of Julius Cæsar,
and for mendacity. He was very vain, very agreeable as long as no one
found fault with him, very lazy, and very sentimental.

In May 1831 Lord Stanhope, who, since the attack on Kaspar in 1829,
had been curious about him, came to Nuremberg, and 'took up' the hero,
with fantastic fondness. Though he recognised Kaspar's mythopoeic
tendencies, he believed him to be the victim of some nefarious
criminals, and offered a reward of 500 florins, anonymously, for
information. It never was claimed.

Already had arisen a new theory, that Kaspar was the son of an
Hungarian magnate. Later, Lord Stanhope averred, on oath, that
inquiries made in Hungary proved Kaspar to be an impostor. In 1830, a
man named Müller, who had been a Protestant preacher, and was now a
Catholic priest, denounced a preacher named Wirth, and a Miss Dalbonn,
a governess, as kidnappers of Kaspar from the family of a Countess,
living near Pesth. Müller was exposed, his motives were revealed, and
the newspapers told the story. Kaspar was therefore tried with
Hungarian words, and seemed to recognise some, especially Posonbya
(Pressburg). He thought that some one had said that his father was at
Pressburg: and thither Lord Stanhope sent him, with Lieutenant Hickel.
This was in 1831, but Kaspar recognised nothing: his companions,
however, found that he pretended to be asleep in the carriage, to hear
what was said about him. They ceased to speak of him, and Kaspar
ceased to slumber. A later expedition into Hungary, by Hickel, in
February 1832, on the strength of more Hungarian excitement on
Kaspar's part, discovered that there was nothing to discover, and
shook the credulity of Lord Stanhope. He could not believe Kaspar's
narrative, but still hoped that he had been terrorised into falsehood.
He could not believe both that the albino had never spoken to Kaspar
in his prison, and also that 'the man always taught me to do what I
was told.' To Lord Stanhope Kaspar averred that 'the man with whom he
had always lived said nothing to him till he was on his journey.' Yet,
during his imprisonment, the man had taught him, he declared, the
phrases which, by his account, were all the words that he knew when he
arrived at Nuremberg.

For these and other obvious reasons, Lord Stanhope, though he had
relieved Nuremberg of Kaspar (November 1831), and made ample provision
for him, was deeply sceptical about his narrative. The town of
Nuremberg had already tried to shift the load of Kaspar on to the
shoulders of the Bavarian Government. Lord Stanhope did not adopt him,
but undertook to pay for his maintenance, and left him, in January
1832, under the charge of a Dr. Meyer, at Anspach. He had a curator,
and a guardian, and escaped from the Commentaries of Julius Cæsar into
the genial society of Feuerbach. That jurist died in May 1833
(poisoned, say the Kasparites), a new guardian was appointed, and
Kaspar lived with Dr. Meyer. Finding him incurably untruthful, the
doctor ceased to provoke him by comments on his inaccuracies, and
Kaspar got a small clerkly place. With this he was much dissatisfied,
for he, like Feuerbach, had expected Lord Stanhope to take him to
England. Feuerbach, in the dedication to Lord Stanhope of his book
(1832), writes, 'Beyond the sea, in fair old England, you have
prepared for him a secure retreat, until the rising sun of Truth shall
have dispersed the darkness which still hangs over his mysterious
fate.' If Lord Stanhope ever made this promise, his growing scepticism
about Kaspar prevented him from fulfilling it. On December 9, 1833,
Meyer was much provoked by Kaspar's inveterate falseness, and said
that he did not know how to face Lord Stanhope, who was expected to
visit Anspach at Christmas. For some weeks Kaspar had been sulky, and
there had been questions about a journal which he was supposed to
keep, but would not show. He was now especially resentful. On two
earlier occasions, after a scene with his tutor, Kaspar had been
injured, once by the assassin who cut his forehead; once by a pistol
accident. On December 14, he rushed into Dr. Meyer's room, pointed to
his side, and led Meyer to a place distant about five hundred yards
from his house. So agitated was he that Meyer would go no further,
especially as Kaspar would answer no questions. On their return,
Kaspar said, 'Went Court Garden--Man--had a knife--gave a
bag--struck--I ran as I could--bag must lie there.' Kaspar was found
to have a narrow wound, 'two inches and a half under the centre of the
left breast,' clearly caused by a very sharp double-edged weapon. In
three or four days he died, the heart had been injured. He was able to
depose, but not on oath, that on the morning of the 14th a man in a
blouse (who had addressed him some days earlier) brought him a verbal
message from the Court gardener, asking him to come and view some clay
from a newly bored well, where, in fact, no work was being done at
this time. He found no one at the well, and went to the monument of
the rather forgotten poet Uz. Here a man came forward, gave him a
bag, stabbed him, and fled. Of the man he gave discrepant
descriptions. He became incoherent, and died.

There was snow lying, when Kaspar was stabbed, but there were no
footmarks near the well, and elsewhere, only one man's track was in
the Hofgarten. Was that track Kaspar's? We are not told. No knife was
found. Kaspar was left-handed, and Dr. Horlacher declared that the
blow must have been dealt by a left-handed man. Lord Stanhope
suggested that Kaspar himself had inflicted the wound by pressure, and
that, after he had squeezed the point of the knife through his wadded
coat, it had penetrated much deeper than he had intended, a very
probable hypothesis.

As for the bag which the assassin gave him, it was found, and Dr.
Meyer said that it was very like a bag which he had seen in Kaspar's
possession. It contained a note, folded, said Madame Meyer, as Kaspar
folded his own notes. The writing was in pencil, in _Spiegelschrift_,
that is, it had to be read in a mirror. Kaspar, on his deathbed, kept
muttering incoherences about 'what is written with lead, no one can
read.' The note contained vague phrases about coming from the Bavarian
frontier.

After Kaspar's death, the question of 'murder or suicide?' agitated
Germany, and gave birth to a long succession of pamphlets. A wild
woman, Countess Albersdorf ('_née_ Lady Graham,' says Miss Evans, who
later calls her 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf'), saw visions, dreamed
dreams, and published nonsense. Other pamphlets came out, directed
against the House of Baden. In 1870 an anonymous French pamphleteer
offered the Baden romance, as from the papers of a Major von
Hennenhofer, the villain in chief of the White Lady plot. Lord
Stanhope was named as the ringleader in the attacks on Kaspar, both at
Nuremberg and Anspach. In 1883 all the fables were revived in a
pamphlet produced at Ratisbon, a mere hash of the libels of 1834,
1839, 1840, and 1870. Dr. Meyer was especially attacked, his sons
defended his reputation by an action for libel on the dead, an action
which German law permits. There was no defence, and the publisher was
fined, and ordered to destroy all the copies. In 1892 the libels were
repeated, by 'Baron Alexander von Artin:' two documents of a palpably
fraudulent character were added, the rest was the old stuff. The
reader may find it in Miss Evans's _Kaspar Hauser_ (1892). For
example, Daumer knew a great deal. He even, in 1833, received an
anonymous letter from Anspach, containing the following statement:
'Lord Daniel Alban Durteal, advocate of the Royal Court in London,
said to me, "I am firmly convinced that Kaspar Hauser was murdered. It
was all done by bribery. Stanhope has no money, and lives by this
affair."' Daumer and Miss Evans appear to have seen nothing odd in
relying on an anonymous letter about Lord Daniel Alban Durteal!

Lord Stanhope, says Miss Evans, 'was known to have subsisted
principally upon the sale of his German hymnbook, and other
devotional works, for which he was a colporteur.' Weary of piety, Lord
Stanhope became a hired assassin. Perhaps this nonsense still has its
believers, seduced by 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf, _née_ Lady Graham,'
by Lord Daniel Alban Durteal, and by the spirit of Kaspar himself,
who, summoned by Daniel Dunglas Home, at a _séance_ with the Empress
Eugénie, apparently, announced himself as Prince of Baden. No
authority for this interesting ghost of one who disbelieved in ghosts
is given.

It is quite possible that Kaspar Hauser no more knew who he was than
the valet of 1669-1703 knew why he was a prisoner, no more than Mr.
Browne, when a dealer in 'notions,' knew that he was Mr. Bourne, a
dissenting preacher. Nothing is certain, except that Kaspar was an
hysterical humbug, whom people of sense suspected from the first, and
whom believers in animal magnetism and homoeopathy accepted as some
great one, educated by his Royal enemies in total darkness--to fit him
for the military profession.

It is difficult, of course, to account for the impossibility of
finding whence Kaspar had come to Nuremberg. But, in 1887, it proved
just as impossible to discover whither the Rev. Ansel Bourne had gone.
Mr. Bourne's lot was cast, not in the sleepy Royalist Bavaria of 1828,
but in the midst of the admired 'hustle' of the great Western
Republic. He was one of the most remarkable men in the country, not a
yokel of sixteen. He was last seen at his nephew's store, 121 Broad
Street, Providence, R.I., on January 17. On January 20, the hue and
cry arose in the able and energetic press of his State. Mr. Bourne, as
a travelling evangelist, was widely known, but, after a fortnight
unaccounted for, he arrived, as A.J. Browne, at Norristown, Pa., sold
notions there, and held forth with acceptance at religious meetings.
On March 14 he awoke, still undiscovered, and wondered where he was.
He remembered nothing since January 17, so he wired to Providence,
R.I., for information. He had a whole fortnight to account for,
between his departure from Providence, R.I., and his arrival at
Norristown, Pa. Nobody could help him, he had apparently walked
invisible, like Kaspar on his way to Nuremberg. He was hypnotised by
Professor William James, and brought into his Browne condition, but
could give practically no verifiable account of Browne's behaviour in
that missing fortnight. He said that he went from Providence to
Pawtucket, and was for some days at Philadelphia, Pa., where he really
seems to have been; as to the rest 'back of that it was mixed up.' We
do not hear that Kaspar was ever hypnotised and questioned, but
probably he also would have been 'mixed up,' like Mr. Bourne.

The fable about a Prince of Baden had not a single shred of evidence
in its favour. It is true that the Grand Duchess was too ill to be
permitted to see her dead baby, in 1812, but the baby's father,
grandmother, and aunt, with the ten Court physicians, the nurses and
others, must have seen it, in death, and it is too absurd to suppose,
on no authority, that they were all parties to the White Lady's plot.
We might as well believe, as Miss Evans seems to do, on the authority
of an unnamed Paris newspaper, that a Latin letter, complaining of
imprisonment, was picked up in the Rhine, signed 'S. Haues Spraucio,'
that the words ought to be read 'Hares Sprauka,' and that they are an
anagram of Kaspar Hauser. This occurred in 1816, when Kaspar, being
about four years of age, could not write Latin. No one in the secret
could have hoped that the Royal infant and captive would be recognised
under the name of Spraucio or even of Sprauka. Abject credulity, love
of mystery, love of scandal, and political passions, produced the
ludicrous mass of fables to which, as late as 1893, the Duchess of
Cleveland thought it advisable to reply. In England it is quite safe
to accuse a dead man of murder, or of what you please, as far as the
Duchess understood the law of libel, so she had no legal remedy.

VII

_THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY_

The singular events called 'The Gowrie Conspiracy,' or 'The Slaying of
the Ruthvens,' fell out, on evidence which nobody disputes, in the
following manner. On August 5, 1600, the King, James VI., was leaving
the stables at the House of Falkland to hunt a buck, when the Master
of Ruthven rode up and had an interview with the monarch. This
occurred about seven o'clock in the morning. The Master was a youth of
nineteen; he was residing with his brother, the Earl of Gowrie, aged
twenty-two, at the family town house in Perth, some twelve or fourteen
miles from Falkland. The interview being ended, the King followed the
hounds, and the chase, 'long and sore,' ended in a kill, at about
eleven o'clock, near Falkland. Thence the King and the Master, with
some fifteen of the Royal retinue, including the Duke of Lennox and
the Earl of Mar, rode, without any delay, to Perth. Others of the
King's company followed: the whole number may have been, at most,
twenty-five.

On their arrival at Perth it appeared that they had not been
expected. The Earl had dined at noon, the Royal dinner was delayed
till two o'clock, and after the scanty meal the King and the Master
went upstairs alone, while the Earl of Gowrie took Lennox and others
into his garden, bordering on the Tay, at the back of the house. While
they loitered there eating cherries, a retainer of Gowrie, Thomas
Cranstoun (brother of Sir John of that ilk), brought a report that the
King had already mounted, and ridden off through the Inch of Perth.
Gowrie called for horses, but Cranstoun told him that his horses were
at Scone, across the Tay, two miles off. The gentlemen then went to
the street door of the house, where the porter said that the King had
_not_ ridden away. Gowrie gave him the lie, re-entered the house, went
upstairs, and returning, assured Lennox that James had certainly
departed. All this is proved on oath by Lennox, Mar, Lindores, and
many other witnesses.

While the company stood in doubt, outside the gate, a turret window
above them opened, and the King looked forth, much agitated, shouting
'Treason!' and crying for help to Mar. With Lennox and most of the
others, Mar ran to the rescue up the main staircase of the house,
where they were stopped by a locked door, which they could not break
open. Gowrie had not gone with his guests to aid the King; he was
standing in the street, asking, 'What is the matter? I know nothing;'
when two of the King's household, Thomas and James Erskine, tried to
seize him, the 'treason' being perpetrated under Gowrie's own roof.
_His_ friends drove the Erskines off, and some of the Murrays of
Tullibardine, who were attending a wedding in Perth, surrounded him.
Gowrie retreated, drew a pair of 'twin swords,' and, accompanied by
Cranstoun and others, made his way into the quadrangle of his house.
At the foot of a small dark staircase they saw the body of a man
lying--wounded or dead. Cranstoun now rushed up the dark stairs,
followed by Gowrie, two Ruthvens, Hew Moncrieff, Patrick Eviot, and
perhaps others. At the head of the narrow spiral stair they found, in
a room called the Gallery Chamber, Sir Thomas Erskine, a lame Dr.
Herries, a young gentleman of the Royal Household named John Ramsay,
and Wilson, a servant, with drawn swords. A fight began; Cranstoun was
wounded; he and his friends fled, leaving Gowrie, who had been run
through the body by Ramsay. All this while the other door of the long
Gallery Chamber was ringing under the hammer-strokes of Lennox and his
company, and the town bell was summoning the citizens. Erskine and
Ramsay now locked the door opening on the narrow stair, at which the
retainers of Gowrie struck with axes. The King's party, by means of a
hammer handed by their friends through a hole in the other door of the
gallery, forced the lock, and admitted Lennox, Mar, and the rest of
the King's retinue. They let James out of a small turret opening from
the Gallery Chamber, and, after some dealings with the angry mob and
the magistrates of Perth, they conveyed the King to Falkland after
nightfall.

The whole results were the death of Gowrie and of his brother, the
Master (his body it was that lay at the foot of the narrow staircase),
and a few wounds to Ramsay, Dr. Herries, and some of Gowrie's
retainers.

The death of the Master of Ruthven was explained thus:--When James
cried 'Treason!' young Ramsay, from the stable door, had heard his
voice, but not his words. He had sped into the quadrangle, charged up
the narrow stairs, found a door behind which was the sound of a
struggle, 'dang in' the door, and saw the King wrestling with the
Master. _Behind them stood a man, the centre of the mystery, of whom
he took no notice._ He drew his whinger, slashed the Master in the
face and throat, and pushed him downstairs. Ramsay then called from
the window to Sir Thomas Erskine, who, with Herries and Wilson, ran to
his assistance, slew the wounded Master, and shut up James (who had no
weapon) in the turret. Then came the struggle in which Gowrie died. No
more was seen of the mysterious man in the turret, except by a
townsman, who later withdrew his evidence.

Such was the whole affair, as witnessed by the King's men, the
retainers of Gowrie, and some citizens of Perth. Not a vestige of plot
or plan by Gowrie and his party was discoverable. His friends
maintained that he had meant, on that day, to leave Perth for
'Lothian,' that is, for his castle at Dirleton, near North Berwick,
whither he had sent most of his men and provisions. James had summoned
the Master to meet him at Falkland, they said, and Gowrie had never
expected the return of the Master with the King.

James's own version was given in a public letter of the night of the
events, which we only know through the report of Nicholson, the
English resident at Holyrood (August 6), and Nicholson only repeated
what Elphinstone, the secretary, told him of the contents of the
letter, written to the King's dictation at Falkland by David Moysie, a
notary. At the end of August James printed and circulated a full
narrative, practically identical with Nicholson's report of
Elphinstone's report of the contents of the Falkland letter of August
5.

The King's narrative is universally accepted on all hands, till we
come to the point where he converses with Alexander Ruthven, at
Falkland, before the buck-hunt began. There was such an interview,
lasting for about a quarter of an hour, but James alone knew its
nature. He says that, after an unusually low obeisance, Ruthven told
the following tale:--Walking alone, on the previous evening, in the
fields near Perth, he had met 'a base-like fellow, unknown to him,
with a cloak cast about his mouth,' a common precaution to avoid
recognition. Asked who he was, and what his errand 'in so solitary a
part, being far from all ways,' the fellow was taken aback. Ruthven
seized him, and, under his arm, found 'a great wide pot, all full of
coined gold in great pieces.' Ruthven keeping the secret to himself,
took the man to Perth, and locked him in 'a privy derned house'--that
is, a room. At 4 A.M. he himself left Perth to tell the King, urging
him to 'take order' in the matter at once, as not even Lord Gowrie
knew of it. When James said that it was no business of his, the gold
not being treasure trove, Ruthven called him 'over scrupulous,' adding
that his brother, Gowrie, 'and other great men,' might interfere.
James then, suspecting that the gold might be foreign, brought in by
Jesuits for the use of Catholic intriguers, asked what the coins and
their bearer were like. Ruthven replied that the bearer seemed to be a
'Scots fellow,' hitherto unknown to him, and that the gold was
apparently of foreign mintage. Hereon James felt sure that the gold
was foreign and the bearer a disguised Scots priest. He therefore
proposed to send back with Ruthven a retainer of his own with a
warrant to Gowrie, then Provost of Perth, and the Bailies, to take
over the man and the money. Ruthven replied that, if they did, the
money would be ill reckoned, and begged the King to ride over at once,
be 'the first seer,' and reward him 'at his own honourable
discretion.'

The oddity of the tale and the strangeness of Ruthven's manner amazed
James, who replied that he would give an answer when the hunt was
over. Ruthven said the man might make a noise, and discover the whole
affair, causing the treasure to be meddled with. He himself would be
missed by Gowrie, whereas, if James came at once, Gowrie and the
townsfolk would be 'at the sermon.' James made no answer, but followed
the hounds. Still he brooded over the story, sent for Ruthven, and
said that the hunt once ended he would accompany him to Perth.

_Here James adds that, though he himself knew not that any man was
with Ruthven, he had two companions, one of whom, Andrew Henderson, he
now despatched to Gowrie, bidding him prepare dinner for the King._
This is not part of James's direct evidence. He was _unknowing and
unsuspecting that any man living had come_ with Ruthven.

Throughout the chase Ruthven was ever near the King, always urging him
'to hasten the end of the hunting.' The buck was slain close to the
stables, and Ruthven would not allow James to wait for a second horse:
that was sent after him. So the King did not even tarry to 'brittle'
the buck, and merely told the Duke of Lennox, Mar, and others that he
was riding to Perth to speak with Gowrie, and would return before
evening. Some of the Court went to Falkland for fresh horses, other
followed slowly with weary steeds. They followed 'undesired by him,'
because a report rose that the King had some purpose to apprehend the
oppressive Master of Oliphant. Ruthven implored James not to bring
Lennox and Mar, but only three or four servants, to which the King
answered 'half angrily.'

This odd conduct roused suspicion in James. He had been well
acquainted with Ruthven, who was suing for the place of a Gentleman of
the Bedchamber, or Cubicular. 'The farthest that the King's suspicion
could reach to was, that it might be that the Earl, his brother, had
handled him so hardly, that the young gentleman, being of a high
spirit, had taken such displeasure as he was beside himself;' hence
his curious, agitated, and moody behaviour. James, as they rode,
consulted Lennox, whose first wife had been a sister of Gowrie. Lennox
had never seen anything of mental unsettlement in young Ruthven, but
James bade the Duke 'accompany him into that house' (room), where the
gold and the bearer of it lay. Lennox thought the story of the gold
'unlikely.' Ruthven seeing them in talk, urged that James should be
secret, and bring nobody with him to the first inspection of the
treasure. The King thus rode forward 'between trust and distrust.'
About two miles from Perth, Ruthven sent on his other companion,
Andrew Ruthven, to Gowrie. When within a mile of Perth, Ruthven
himself rode forward in advance. Gowrie was at dinner, having taken no
notice of the two earlier messengers.

Gowrie, with fifty or sixty men, met James 'at the end of the Inch;'
the Royal retinue was then of fifteen persons, with swords alone, and
no daggers or 'whingers.' Dinner did not appear till an hour had gone
by (say 2 P.M.). James whispered to Ruthven that he had better see the
treasure at once: Ruthven bade him wait, and not arouse Gowrie's
suspicions by whispering ('rounding'). James therefore directed his
conversation to Gowrie, getting from him 'but half words and imperfect
sentences.' When dinner came Gowrie stood pensively by the King's
table, often whispering to the servants, 'and oft-times went in and
out,' as he also did before dinner. The suite stood about, as was
custom, till James had nearly dined, when Gowrie took them to their
dinner, separately in the hall; 'he sat not down with them as the
common manner is,' but again stood silent beside the King, who
bantered him 'in a homely manner.'

James having sat long enough, Ruthven whispered that he wished to be
rid of his brother, so James sent Gowrie into the hall to offer a kind
of grace-cup to the suite, as was usual--this by Ruthven's desire.
James then rose to follow Ruthven, asking him to bring Sir Thomas
Erskine with him. Ruthven requested James to 'command publicly' that
none should follow at once, promising that 'he should make any one or
two follow that he pleased to call for.'

The King then, expecting attendants who never came because Ruthven
never summoned them, walked alone with Ruthven across the end of the
hall, up a staircase, and through three or four chambers, Ruthven
'ever locking behind him every door as he passed.' We do not know
whether James observed the locking of the doors, or inferred it from
the later discovery that one door was locked. Then Ruthven showed 'a
more smiling countenance than he had all the day before, ever saying
that he had him sure and safe enough kept.' At last they reached 'a
little study' (a turret chamber), where James found, 'not a bondman,
but a freeman, with a dagger at his girdle,' and 'a very abased
countenance.' Ruthven locked the turret door, put his hat on his head,
drew the man's dagger, pointed it at the King's breast, 'avowing now
that the King behoved to be in his will and used as he list,'
threatening murder if James cried out, or opened the window. He also
reminded the King of the death of the late Gowrie, his father
(executed for treason in 1584). Meanwhile the other man stood
'trembling and quaking.' James made a long harangue on many points,
promising pardon and silence if Ruthven at once let him go. Ruthven
then uncovered, and promised that James's life should be safe if he
kept quiet; the rest Gowrie would explain. Then, bidding the other man
ward the King, he went out, locking the door behind him. He had first
made James swear not to open the window. In his brief absence James
learned from the armed man that he had but recently been locked up in
the turret, he knew not why. James bade him open the window 'on his
right hand.' The man did as he was commanded.

Here the King's narrative reverts to matter not within his own
observation (the events which occurred downstairs during his own
absence). His narrative is amply confirmed, on oath, by many nobles
and gentlemen. He says (here we repeat what we began by stating) that,
during his own absence, as his train was rising from dinner, one of
the Earl's servants, Cranstoun, came hastily in, assuring the Earl
that the King had got to horse, and 'was away through the Inch' (isle)
of Perth. The Earl reported this to the nobles, and all rushed to the
gate. The porter assured them that the King had not departed. Gowrie
gave the porter the lie, but, turning to Lennox and Mar, said that he
would get sure information. He then ran back across the court, and
upstairs, and returned, running, with the news that 'the King was
gone, long since, by the back gate, and, unless they hasted, would not
be overtaken.'

The nobles, going towards the stables for their horses, necessarily
passed under the window of the turret on the first floor where James
was imprisoned. Ruthven by this time had returned thither, 'casting
his hands abroad in a desperate manner as a man lost.' Then, saying
that there was no help for it, the King must die, he tried to bind the
royal hands with his garter. In the struggle James drew Ruthven
towards the window, already open. At this nick of time, when the
King's friends were standing in the street below, Gowrie with them,
James, 'holding out the right side of his head and his right elbow,'
shouted for help. Gowrie stood 'ever asking what it meant,' but
Lennox, Mar, and others, as we saw, instantly ran in, and up the chief
staircase to find the King. Meanwhile James, in his agony, pushed
Ruthven out of the turret, 'the said Mr. Alexander's head under his
arms, and himself on his knees,' towards the chamber door which opened
on the dark staircase. James was trying to get hold of Ruthven's sword
and draw it, 'the other fellow doing nothing but standing behind the
King's back and trembling all the time.' At this moment a young
gentleman of the Royal Household, John Ramsay, entered from the dark
_back_ staircase, and struck Ruthven with his dagger. 'The other
fellow' withdrew. James then pushed Ruthven down the back stairs,
where he was slain by Sir Thomas Erskine and Dr. Herries, who were
coming up by that way. The rest, with the death of Gowrie, followed. A
tumult of the townsmen, lasting for two or three hours, delayed the
return of James to Falkland.

Such is the King's published narrative. It tallies closely with the
letter written by Nicholson, the English agent, to Cecil, on August 6.

James had thus his version, from which he never varied, ready on the
evening of the fatal day, August 5. From his narrative only one
inference can be drawn. Gowrie and his brother had tried to lure
James, almost unattended, to their house. In the turret they had an
armed man, who would assist the Master to seize the King. Events
frustrated the conspiracy; James was well attended; the armed man
turned coward, and Gowrie proclaimed the King's departure falsely to
make his suite follow back to Falkland, and so leave the King in the
hands of his captors. The plot, once arranged, could not be abandoned,
because the plotters had no prisoner with a pot of gold to produce, so
their intended treason would have been manifest.

How far is James's tale corroborated? At the posthumous trial of the
Ruthvens in November, witnesses like Lennox swore to his quarter of an
hour of talk with Ruthven at Falkland before the hunt. The _early_
arrival of Andrew Henderson at Gowrie's house, about half-past ten, is
proved by two gentlemen named Hay, and one named Moncrieff, who were
then with Gowrie on business to which he at once refused to attend
further, in the case of the Hays. Henderson's presence with Ruthven at
Falkland is also confirmed by a manuscript vindication of the Ruthvens
issued at the time. None of the King's party saw him, and their
refusal to swear that they did see him shows their honesty, the point
being essential. Thus the circumstance that Gowrie ordered no dinner
for the King, despite Henderson's early arrival with news of his
coming, shows that Gowrie meant to affect being taken by surprise.
Again, the flight of Henderson on the very night of August 5 proves
that he was implicated: why else should a man fly who had not been
seen by anyone (except a Perth witness who withdrew his evidence) in
connection with the fatal events? No other man fled, except some of
Gowrie's retainers who took open part in the fighting.

James's opinion that Ruthven was deranged, in consequence of harsh
treatment by his brother, Gowrie, is explained by a dispute between
the brothers about the possession of the church lands of Scone, which
Gowrie held, and Ruthven desired, the King siding with Ruthven. This
is quite casually mentioned in a contemporary manuscript.[13] Again,
Lennox, on oath, averred that, as they rode to Perth, James told him
the story of the lure, the pot of gold. Lennox was a man of honour,
and he had married Gowrie's sister.

[Footnote 13: 'The True Discourse of the Late Treason,' _State
Papers_, Scotland, Elizabeth, vol. lvi. No. 50.]

Ruthven, on his return to Gowrie's house, told a retainer,
Craigingelt, that he 'had been on an errand not far off,' and
accounted for the King's arrival by saying that he was 'brought' by
the royal saddler to exact payment of a debt to the man. Now James had
just given Gowrie a year's immunity from pursuit of creditors, and
there is no trace of the saddler's presence. Clearly Ruthven lied to
Craigingelt; he had been at Falkland, _not_ 'on an errand not far
off.'

That Cranstoun, Gowrie's man, brought the news, or rumour, of the
King's departure was admitted by himself. That Gowrie went into the
house to verify the fact; insisted that it was true; gave the lie to
the porter, who denied it; and tried to make the King's party take
horse and follow, was proved by Lennox, Lindores, Ray (a magistrate of
Perth), the porter himself, and others, on oath.

That the King was locked in by a door which could not be burst open is
matter of undisputed certainty.

All these are facts that 'winna ding, and downa be disputed.' They
_were_ disputed, however, when Henderson, Gowrie's factor, or steward,
and a town councillor of Perth, came out of hiding between August 11
and August 20, told his story and confessed to having been the man in
the turret. He said that on the night of August 4 Gowrie bade him ride
very early next day with the Master of Ruthven to Falkland, and return
with any message that Ruthven might send. He did return--when the Hays
and Moncrieff saw him--with news that the King was coming. An hour
later Gowrie bade him put on a shirt of mail and plate sleeves, as he
meant to arrest a Highlander in the Shoe-gait. Later, the King
arriving, Henderson was sent to Ruthven, in the gallery, and told to
do whatever he was bidden. Ruthven then locked him up in the turret,
giving no explanation. Presently the King was brought into the turret,
and Henderson pretends that, to a faint extent, he hampered the
violence of Ruthven. During the struggle between Ramsay and Ruthven he
slunk downstairs, went home, and fled that night.

It was denied that Henderson had been at Falkland at all. Nobody swore
to his presence there, yet it is admitted by the contemporary
apologist, who accuses the King of having organised the whole
conspiracy against the Ruthvens. It was said that nobody saw Henderson
slink away out of the narrow stair, though the quadrangle was crowded.
One Robertson, however, a notary of Perth, gave evidence (September
23) that he did see Henderson creep out of the narrow staircase and
step over the Master's dead body; Robertson spoke to him, but he made
no reply. If Robertson perjured himself on September 23, he withdrew
his evidence, or rather, he omitted it, at the trial in November. His
life would not have been worth living in Perth--where the people were
partisans of the Ruthvens--if he had adhered to his first statement.
In the absence of other testimony many fables were circulated as to
Henderson's absence from Perth all through the day, and, on the other
hand, as to his presence, in the kitchen, during the crisis. He was
last seen, for certain, in the house just before the King's dinner,
and then, by his account, was locked up in the turret by the Master.
Probably Robertson's first story was true. Other witnesses, to shield
their neighbours, denied having seen retainers of Gowrie's who most
assuredly were present at the brawls in the quadrangle. It was never
explained why Henderson fled at once if he was not the man in the
turret. I therefore conceive that, as he certainly was at Falkland,
and certainly returned early, his story is true in the main.

Given all this, only one of two theories is possible. The affair was
not accidental; James did not fall into a panic and bellow 'Treason!'
out of the window, merely because he found himself alone in a
turret--and why in a secluded turret?--with the Master. To that theory
the locked door of the gallery is a conclusive reply. Somebody locked
it for some reason. Therefore either the Ruthvens plotted against the
King, or the King plotted against the Ruthvens. Both parties had good
grounds for hatred, as we shall show--that is, Gowrie and James had
motives for quarrel; but with the young Master, whose cause, as
regards the lands of Scone, the King espoused, he had no reason for
anger. If James was guilty, how did he manage his intrigue?

With motives for hating Gowrie, let us say, the King lays his plot. He
chooses for it a day when he knows that the Murrays of Tullibardine
will be in Perth at the wedding of one of the clan. They will defend
the King from the townsfolk, clients of their Provost, Gowrie. James
next invites Ruthven to Falkland (this was asserted by Ruthven's
defenders): he arrives at the strangely early hour of 6.30 A.M. James
has already invented the story of the pot of gold, to be confided to
Lennox, as proof that Ruthven is bringing him to Perth--that he has
not invited Ruthven.

Next, by secretly spreading a rumour that he means to apprehend the
Master of Oliphant, James secures a large train of retainers, let us
say twenty-five men, without firearms, while he escapes the suspicion
that would be aroused if he ordered them to accompany him. James has
determined to sacrifice Ruthven (with whom he had no quarrel
whatever), merely as bait to draw Gowrie into a trap.

Having put Lennox off with a false reason for his accompanying Ruthven
alone in the house of Gowrie, James privately arranges that Ruthven
shall quietly summon him, or Erskine, to follow upstairs, meaning to
goad Ruthven into a treasonable attitude just as they appear on the
scene. He calculates that Lennox, Erskine, or both, will then stab
Ruthven without asking questions, and that Gowrie will rush up, to
avenge his brother, and be slain.

But here his Majesty's deeply considered plot, on a superficial view,
breaks down, since Ruthven (for reasons best known to himself) summons
neither Lennox nor Erskine. James, observing this circumstance,
rapidly and cleverly remodels his plot, and does not begin to provoke
the brawl till, being, Heaven knows why, in the turret, he hears his
train talking outside in the street. He had shrewdly provided for
their presence there by ordering a servant of his own to spread the
false rumour of his departure, which Cranstoun innocently brought.
Why did the King do this, as his original idea involved no need of
such a stratagem? He had also, somehow, persuaded Gowrie to credit the
rumour, in the face of the porter's denial of its possibility, and to
persist in it, after making no very serious attempt to ascertain its
truth. To succeed in making Gowrie do this, in place of thoroughly
searching the house, is certainly the King's most striking and
inexplicable success.

The King has thus two strings to his nefarious bow. The first was that
Ruthven, by his orders, would bring Erskine and Lennox, and, just as
they appeared, James would goad Ruthven into a treasonable attitude,
whereon Lennox and Erskine would dirk him. The second plan, if this
failed (as it did, because Ruthven did not obey orders), was to
deceive Gowrie into bringing the retinue under the turret window, so
that the King could open the window and cry 'Treason!' as soon as he
heard their voices and footsteps below. This plan succeeds. James
yells out of the window. Not wanting many spectators, he has, somehow,
locked the door leading into the gallery, while giving Ramsay a hint
to wait outside of the house, within hearing, and to come up by the
back staircase, which was built in a conspicuous tower.

The rest is easy. Gowrie may bring up as many men as he pleases, but
Ramsay has had orders to horrify him by saying that the King is slain
(this was alleged), and then to run him through as he gives ground, or
drops his points; this after a decent form of resistance, in which
three of the King's four men are wounded.

'Master of the human heart,' like Lord Bateman, James knows that
Ruthven will not merely leave him, when goaded by insult, and that
Gowrie, hearing of his brother's death, will not simply stand in the
street and summon the citizens.

To secure a witness to the truth of his false version of the matter
James must have begun by artfully bribing Henderson, Gowrie's steward,
either simply to run away, and then come in later with corroboration,
or actually to be present in the turret, and then escape. Or perhaps
the King told his man-in-the-turret tale merely 'in the air;' and then
Henderson, having run away in causeless panic, later 'sees money in
it,' and appears, with a string of falsehoods. 'Chance loves Art,'
says Aristotle, and chance might well befriend an artist so capable
and conscientious as his Majesty. To be sure Mr. Hill Burton says 'the
theory that the whole was a plot of the Court to ruin the powerful
House of Gowrie must at once, after a calm weighing of the evidence,
be dismissed as beyond the range of sane conclusions. Those who formed
it had to put one of the very last men in the world to accept of such
a destiny into the position of an unarmed man who, without any
preparation, was to render himself into the hands of his armed
adversaries, and cause a succession of surprises and acts of violence,
which, by his own courage and dexterity, he would rule to a determined
and preconcerted plan.'[14]

[Footnote 14: Burton, _History of Scotland_, v. 336.]

If there was a royal plot, _without a plan_, then James merely
intended to raise a brawl and 'go it blind.' This, however, is almost
beyond the King's habitual and romantic recklessness. We must prefer
the theory of a subtly concerted and ably conducted plan, constructed
with alternatives, so that, if one string breaks, another will hold
fast. That plan, to the best of my poor powers, I have explained.

To drop the figure of irony, all this hypothesis is starkly
incredible. James was not a recklessly adventurous character to go
weaponless with Ruthven, who wore a sword, and provoke him into
insolence. If he had been ever so brave, the plot is of a complexity
quite impossible; no sane man, still less a timid man, could conceive
and execute a plot at the mercy of countless circumstances, not to be
foreseen. Suppose the Master slain, and Gowrie a free man in the
street. He had only to sound the tocsin, summon his devoted townsmen,
surround the house, and ask respectfully for explanations.

Take, on the other hand, the theory of Gowrie's guilt. Here the
motives for evil will on either side may be briefly stated. Since the
murder of Riccio (1566) the Ruthvens had been the foes of the Crown.
Gowrie's grandfather and father were leaders in the attack on Mary and
Riccio; Gowrie's father insulted Queen Mary, while caged in Loch Leven
Castle, by amorous advances--so she declares. In 1582 Gowrie's father
captured James and held him in degrading captivity. He escaped, and
was reconciled to his gaoler, who, in 1584, again conspired, and was
executed, while the Ruthven lands were forfeited. By a new revolution
(1585-1586) the Ruthvens were reinstated. In July 1593 Gowrie's
mother, by an artful ambuscade, enabled the Earl of Bothwell again to
kidnap the King. In 1594 our Gowrie, then a lad, joined Bothwell in
open rebellion. He was pardoned, and in August 1594 went abroad,
travelled as far as Rome, studied at Padua, and, summoned by the party
of the Kirk, came to England in March 1600. Here he was petted by
Elizabeth, then on almost warlike terms with James. For thirty years
every treason of the Ruthvens had been backed by Elizabeth; and Cecil,
ceaselessly and continuously, had abetted many attempts to kidnap
James. These plots were rife as late as April 1600. The object always
was to secure the dominance of the Kirk over the King, and Gowrie, as
the natural noble leader of the Kirk, was recalled to Scotland, in
1600, by the Rev. Mr. Bruce, the chief of the political preachers,
whom James had mastered in 1596-97. Gowrie, arriving, instantly headed
the Opposition, and, on June 21, 1600, successfully resisted the
King's request for supplies, rendered necessary by his hostile
relations with England. Gowrie then left the Court, and about July 20
went to hunt in Atholl; his mother (who had once already lured James
into a snare) residing at his Perth house. On August 1 Gowrie warned
his mother of his return, and she went to their strong castle of
Dirleton, near North Berwick and the sea, while Gowrie came to his
Perth house on August 3, it being understood that he was to ride to
Dirleton on August 5. Thither he had sent on most of his men and
provisions. On August 5, we know he went on a longer journey.

We have shown that a plot by James is incredible. There is no evidence
to prove a plot by Gowrie, beyond the whole nature of the events, and
the strange conduct of himself and his brother. But, if plot he did,
he merely carried out, in the interests of his English friends, the
traditional policy of his grandfather, his father, his mother, and his
ally, Bothwell, at this time an exile in Spain, maturing a conspiracy
in which he claimed Gowrie as one of his confederates. While the King
was a free man, Gowrie could not hope to raise the discontented
Barons, and emancipate the preachers--yet more bitterly
discontented--who had summoned him home. Let the King vanish, and the
coast was clear; the Kirk's party, the English party, would triumph.

The inference is that the King was to be made to disappear, and that
Gowrie undertook to do it. Two witnesses--Mr. Cowper, minister of
Perth, and Mr. Rhynd, Gowrie's old tutor--averred that he was wont to
speak of the need of extreme secrecy 'in the execution of a high and
dangerous purpose.' Such a purpose as the trapping of the King by a
secret and sudden onfall was the mere commonplace of Scottish
politics. Cecil's papers, at this period and later, are full of such
schemes, submitted by Scottish adventurers. That men so very young as
the two Ruthvens should plan such a device, romantic and perilous, is
no matter for marvel.

The plot itself must be judged by its original idea, namely, to lure
James to Perth, with only two or three servants, at an early hour in
the day. Matters fell out otherwise; but, had the King entered Gowrie
House early, and scantly attended, he might have been conveyed across
Fife, disguised, in the train of Gowrie as he went to Dirleton. Thence
he might be conveyed by sea to Fastcastle, the impregnable eyrie of
Gowrie's and Bothwell's old ally, the reckless intriguer, Logan of
Restalrig. The famous letters which Scott, Tytler, and Hill Burton
regarded as proof of that plot, I have shown, by comparison of
handwritings, to be all forged; but one of them, claimed by the forger
as his model for the rest, is, I think, a feigned copy of a genuine
original. In that letter (of Logan to Gowrie) he is made to speak of
their scheme as analogous to one contrived against 'a nobleman of
Padua,' where Gowrie had studied. This remark, in a postscript, can
hardly have been invented by the forger, Sprot, a low country
attorney, a creature of Logan's. All the other letters are mere
variations on the tune set by this piece.

A plot of this kind is, at least, not impossible, like the quite
incredible conspiracy attributed to James. The scheme was only one of
scores of the same sort, constantly devised at that time. The thing
next to impossible is that Henderson was left, as he declared, in the
turret, by Ruthven, without being tutored in his _rôle_. The King's
party did not believe that Henderson here told truth; he had accepted
the _rôle_, they said, but turned coward. This is the more likely as,
in December 1600, a gentleman named Robert Oliphant, a retainer of
Gowrie, fled from Edinburgh, where certain revelations blabbed by him
had come into publicity. He had said that, in Paris, early in 1600,
Gowrie moved him to take the part of the armed man in the turret; that
he had 'with good reason dissuaded him; that the Earl thereon left him
and dealt with Henderson in that matter; that Henderson undertook it
and yet fainted'--that is, turned craven. Though nine years later, in
England, the Privy Council acquitted Oliphant of concealing treason,
had he not escaped from Edinburgh in December 1600 the whole case
might have been made clear, for witnesses were then at hand.

We conclude that, as there certainly was a Ruthven plot, as the King
could not possibly have invented and carried out the affair, and that
as Gowrie, the leader of the Kirk party, was young, romantic, and
'Italianate,' he did plan a device of the regular and usual kind, but
was frustrated, and fell into the pit which he had digged. But the
Presbyterians would never believe that the young leader of the Kirk
party attempted what the leaders of the godly had often done, and far
more frequently had conspired to do, with the full approval of Cecil
and Elizabeth. The plot was an orthodox plot, but, to this day,
historians of Presbyterian and Liberal tendencies prefer to believe
that the King was the conspirator. The dead Ruthvens were long
lamented, and even in the nineteenth century the mothers, in
Perthshire, sang to their babes, 'Sleep ye, sleep ye, my bonny Earl o'
Gowrie.'[15]

[Footnote 15: The story, with many new documents, is discussed at
quite full length in the author's _King James and the Gowrie Mystery_,
Longmans, 1902.]

A lady has even written to inform me that she is the descendant of the
younger Ruthven, who escaped after being stabbed by Ramsay and
Erskine, fled to England, married, and had a family. I in vain replied
that young Ruthven's body was embalmed, exhibited in the Scottish
Parliament, and hacked to pieces, which were set on spikes in public
places, and that after these sufferings he was unlikely to marry. The
lady was not to be shaken in her belief.

In _The Athenæum_ for August 28, 1902, Mr. Edmund Gosse recognises
Ramsay the Ruthven slayer as author of a Century of English Sonnets
(1619), of which Lord Cobham possesses a copy apparently unique. The
book was published at Paris, by Réné Giffart. The Scottish name,
Gifford, was at that time spelled 'Giffart,' so the publisher was of
Scottish descent.

VIII

_THE STRANGE CASE OF DANIEL DUNGLAS HOME_

The case of Daniel Dunglas Home is said, in the _Dictionary of
National Biography_, to present a curious and unsolved problem. It
really presents, I think, two problems equally unsolved, one
scientific, and the other social. How did Mr. Home, the son of a
Scottish mother in the lower middle class at highest, educated (as far
as he was educated at all) in a village of Connecticut, attain his
social position? I do not ask why he was 'taken up' by members of
noble English families: 'the caresses of the great' may be lavished on
athletes, and actors, and musicians, and Home's remarkable
performances were quite enough to make him welcome in country houses.
Moreover, he played the piano, the accordion, and other musical
instruments. For his mysterious 'gift' he might be invited to puzzle
and amuse royal people (not in England), and continental emperors, and
kings. But he did much more than what Houdin or Alexis, a conjuror and
a clairvoyant, could do. He successively married, with the permission
and good will of the Czar, two Russian ladies of noble birth, a feat
inexplicable when we think of the rules of the continental _noblesse_.
A duc, or a prince, or a marquis may marry the daughter of an American
citizen who has made a fortune in lard. But the daughters of the
Russian _noblesse_ do not marry poor American citizens with the good
will of the Czar. By his marriages Home far outwent such famous
charlatans as Cagliostro, Mesmer, and the mysterious Saint Germain the
deathless. Cagliostro and Saint Germain both came on the world with an
appearance of great wealth and display. The source of the opulence of
Saint Germain is as obscure as was the source of the sudden enrichment
of Beau Wilson, whom Law, the financier, killed in a duel. Cagliostro,
like Law, may have acquired his diamonds by gambling or swindling. But
neither these two men nor Mesmer, though much in the society of
princes, could have hoped, openly and with the approval of Louis XV.
or Louis XVI., to wed a noble lady. Yet Home did so twice, though he
had no wealth at all.

Cagliostro was a low-born Neapolitan ruffian. But he had a presence!
In the Memoirs of Madame d'Oberkirch she tells us how much she
disliked and distrusted Cagliostro, always avoiding him, and warning
Cardinal Rohan against him--in vain. But she admits that the man
dominated her, or would have dominated her, by something inexplicable
in his eyes, his bearing, and his unaccountable knowledge, as when he
publicly announced, on a certain day, the death of the great Empress,
Maria Theresa, of which the news did not arrive till five days later.
Now Home had none of this dominating personality. He has been
described to me, by a lady who knew him in his later years, when he
had ceased to work drawing-room miracles in society, as a gentle,
kindly, quiet person, with no obvious fault, unless a harmless and
childlike vanity be a fault. Thus he struck an observer not of his
intimate circle. He liked to give readings and recitations, and he
played the piano with a good deal of feeling. He was a fair linguist,
he had been a Catholic, he was of the middle order of intelligence, he
had no 'mission' except to prove that disembodied spirits exist, if
that were a legitimate inference from the marvels which attended him.

Mr. Robert Bell in _The Cornhill Magazine_, Vol. II., 1860, described
Home's miracles in an article called 'Stranger than Fiction.' His
account of the man's personality is exactly like what I have already
given. Home was 'a very mild specimen of familiar humanity.' His
health was bad. 'The expression of his face in repose' (he was only
twenty-seven) 'is that of physical suffering.... There is more
kindliness and gentleness than vigour in the character of his
features.... He is yet so young that the playfulness of boyhood has
not passed away, and he never seems so thoroughly at ease with himself
and others as when he is enjoying some light and temperate
amusement.'

Thus there was nothing in Home to dominate, or even to excite personal
curiosity. He and his more intimate friends, not marchionesses but
middle-class people, corresponded in a style of rather distasteful
effusiveness. He was a pleasant young man in a house, not a Don Juan.
I have never heard a whisper about light loves--unless Mr. Hamilton
Aïdé, to be quoted later, reports such a whisper--not a word against
his private character, except that he allowed a terribly vulgar rich
woman to adopt him, and give him a very large sum of money, later
withdrawn. We shall see that she probably had mixed motives both for
giving and for withdrawing the gift, but it was asserted, though on
evidence far from sound, that 'the spirits' had rapped out a command
to give Home some thirty thousand pounds. Spirits ought not to do
these things, and, certainly, it would have been wiser in Home to
refuse the widow's gold even if they did. Beyond this one affair, and
an alleged case of imposture at a _séance_, Home's private character
raised no scandals that have survived into our knowledge. It is a very
strange thing, as we shall see, that the origin of Home's miracles in
broad daylight or artificial light, could never be traced to fraud,
or, indeed, to any known cause; while the one case in which imposture
is alleged on first-hand evidence occurred under conditions of light
so bad as to make detection as difficult as belief in such
circumstances, ought to have been impossible. It is not easy to feel
sure that we have certainly detected a fraud in a dim light; but it is
absurd to believe in a miracle, when the conditions of light are such
as to make detection difficult.

Given this mild young musical man, the problems of how he achieved his
social successes, and how he managed to escape exposure, if he did his
miracles by conjuring, are almost equally perplexing. The second
puzzle is perhaps the less hard of the two, for Home did not make
money as a medium (though he took money's worth), and in private
society few seized and held the mystic hands that moved about, or when
they seized they could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people
said.

A sketch of Home's life must now be given.[16] He was born in 1833, at
Currie, a village near Edinburgh. In his later years he sent to his
second wife a photograph of the street of cottages beside the burn, in
one of which he first saw the light. His father had a right to bear
the arms of the Earls of Home, with a _brisure_, being the natural son
of Alexander, tenth Earl of Home.[17] The Medium's ancestor had
fought, or, according to other accounts, had shirked fighting, at
Flodden Field, as is popularly known from the ballad _The Sutors of
Selkirk_. The maiden name of Home's mother was Macneil. He was adopted
by an aunt, who, about 1842, carried the wondrous child to America. He
had, since he was four years old, given examples of second sight; it
was in the family. Home's mother, who died in 1850, was
second-sighted, as were her great-uncle, an Urquhart, and her uncle, a
Mackenzie. So far there was nothing unusual or alarming in Home's
case, at least to any intelligent Highlander. Not till 1850, after his
mother's death, did Home begin to hear 'loud blows on the head of my
bed, as if struck by a hammer.' The Wesley family, in 1716-17, had
been quite familiar with this phenomenon, and with other rappings, and
movements of objects untouched. In fact all these things are of
world-wide diffusion, and I know no part of the world, savage or
civilised, where such events do not happen, according to the evidence.

[Footnote 16: I follow _Incidents in My Life_, Series i. ii., 1864,
1872. _The Gift of Daniel Home_, by Madame Douglas Home and other
authorities.]

[Footnote 17: Home mentions this fact in a note, correcting an error
of Sir David Brewster's, _Incidents_, ii. 48, Note 1. The Earl of Home
about 1856 asked questions on the subject, and Home 'stated what my
connection with the family was.' Dunglas is the second title in the
family.]

In no instance, as far as I am informed, did anything extraordinary
occur in connection with Home which cannot be paralleled in the
accounts of Egyptian mediums in Iamblichus.[18]

[Footnote 18: The curious reader may consult my _Cock Lane and Common
Sense_, and _The Making of Religion_, for examples of savage,
mediæval, ancient Egyptian, and European cases.]

In 1850 America was interested in 'The Rochester Knockings,' and the
case of the Fox girls, a replica of the old Cock Lane case which
amused Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole. The Fox girls became
professional mediums, and, long afterwards, confessed that they were
impostors. They were so false that their confession is of no value as
evidence, but certainly they were humbugs. The air was full of talk
about them, and other people like them, when Home, aged seventeen, was
so constantly attended by noises of rappings that his aunt threw a
chair at him, summoned three preachers, an Independent, a Baptist, and
a Wesleyan (Home was then a Wesleyan), and plunged into conflict with
the devil. The furniture now began to move about, untouched by man,
and Home's aunt turned him out of the house. Home went to a friend in
another little town, people crowded to witness the phenomena, and the
press blazoned the matter abroad. Henceforth, Home was a wonder
worker; but once, for a whole year--February 1856 to February
1857--'the power' entirely deserted him, and afterwards, for shorter
periods.

In 1852 he was examined by the celebrated American poet, Bryant, by a
professor of Harvard, and others, who reported the usual physical
phenomena, and emphatically declared that 'we know we were not imposed
upon or deceived.' 'Spirits' spoke through the voice of the entranced
Home, or rapped out messages, usually gushing, and Home floated in the
air, at the house of Mr. Ward Cheney, at South Manchester,
Connecticut. This phenomenon is constantly reported in the Bible, in
the Lives of the Saints by the Bollandists, in the experiences of the
early Irvingites, in witch trials, in Iamblichus, and in savage and
European folklore. Lord Elcho, who was out with Prince Charles in the
Forty-Five, writes in his unpublished Memoirs that, being at Rome
about 1767, he went to hear the evidence in the process of canonising
a saint, recently dead, and heard witnesses swear that they had seen
the saint, while alive, floating about in the air, like Home. St.
Theresa was notorious for this accomplishment. Home's first feat of
this kind occurred 'in a darkened room,' a very dark room indeed, as
the evidence shows. It had been darkened on purpose to try an
experiment in seeing 'N rays,' which had been recently investigated by
Reichenbach. Science has brought them recently back into notice. The
evidence for the fact, in this case, was that people felt Home's feet
in mid air. 'I have been lifted in the light of day only once, and
that was in America;' also, in the light of four gas lamps 'in a room
in Sloane Street.'

After attracting a good deal of notice in New York, Home, on April 9,
1855, turned up at Cox's Hotel, Jermyn Street, where Mr. Cox gave him
hospitality as a _non_-'paying guest.' Now occurred the affair of Sir
David Brewster and Lord Brougham. Both were capable of hallucinations.
Lord Brougham published an account of a common death-bed wraith, which
he saw once while in a bath (the vision coincided with the death of
the owner of the wraith), and Sir David's daughter tells how that
philosopher saw that of the Rev. Mr. Lyon, in St. Leonard's College,
St. Andrews, a wraith whose owner was in perfect health. Sir David
sent letters, forming a journal, to his family, and, in June (no day
given) 1855, described his visit to Home. He says that he, Lord
Brougham, Mr. Cox, and Home sat down 'at a moderately sized table,
_the structure of which we were invited to examine_. In a short time
the table shuddered and a tremulous motion ran up our arms.... The
table actually rose from the ground, when no hand was upon it. A
larger table was produced, and exhibited similar movements. An
accordion was held in Lord Brougham's hand, and gave out a single
note.... A small hand-bell was then laid with its mouth on the carpet,
and after lying for some time, it actually rang when nothing could
have touched it. The bell was then placed upon the other side, still
upon the carpet, and it came over to me, and placed itself in my hand.
It did the same to Lord Brougham. These were the principal
experiments: we could give no explanation of them, and could not
conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism.... We
do not believe that it was the work of spirits.'

So Sir David wrote in a private letter of June 1855, just after the
events. But the affair came to be talked about, and, on September 29,
1855, Sir David wrote to _The Morning Advertiser_. He had seen, he
said, 'several mechanical effects which I was unable to explain....
But I saw enough to convince myself that they could all be produced by
human feet and hands,' though he also, in June, 'could not conjecture
how they could be produced by any kind of mechanism.' Later, October
9, Sir David again wrote to the newspaper. This time he said that he
might have discovered the fraud, had he 'been permitted to take a peep
beneath the drapery of the table.' But in June he said that he 'was
invited to examine the structure of the table.' He denied that 'a
large table was moved about in a most extraordinary way.' In June he
had asserted that this occurred. He declared that the bell did not
ring. In June he averred that it rang 'when nothing could have touched
it.' In October he suggested that machinery attached to 'the lower
extremities of Mr. Home's body' could produce the effects: in June 'we
could not conjecture how they could be produced by any kind of
mechanism.' On Sir David's death, his daughter and biographer, Mrs.
Gordon, published (1869) his letter of June 1855. Home then scored
rather freely, as the man of science had denied publicly, in October
1855, what he had privately written to his family in June 1855, when
the events were fresh in his memory. This was not the only case in
which 'a scientist of European reputation did not increase his
reputation' for common veracity in his attempts to put down Home.

The adventures of Home in the Courts of Europe, his desertion of the
errors of Wesleyan Methodism for those of the Church of Rome, his
handsome entertainment by diamond-giving emperors, his expulsion from
Rome as a sorcerer, and so forth, cannot be dealt with here for lack
of space. We come to the great Home-Browning problem.

In 1855, Home met Mr. and Mrs. Browning at the house of a Mr. Rymer,
at Ealing, the first of only two meetings.[19] On this occasion, says
Home, a wreath of clematis rose from the table and floated towards
Mrs. Browning, behind whom her husband went and stood. The wreath
settled on the lady's head, not on that of Mr. Browning, who, Home
thought, was jealous of the favour. This is manifestly absurd. Soon
after, all but Mr. Rymer were invited to leave the room. Two days
later, Mr. Browning asked to be allowed to bring a friend for another
_séance_, but the arrangements of the Rymers, with whom Home was
staying, made this impossible. Later, Home, with Mrs. Rymer, called on
the Brownings in town, and Mr. Browning declined to notice Home; there
was a scene, and Mrs. Browning (who was later a three-quarters
believer in 'spirits') was distressed. In 1864, after Mrs. Browning's
death, Mr. Browning published _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_, which had the
air of a personal attack on Home as a detected and confessing American
impostor. Such is Home's account. It was published in 1872, and was
open to contradiction. I am not aware that Mr. Browning took any
public notice of it.

[Footnote 19: _Incidents_, ii. 105.]

In July 1889 the late Mr. F.W.H. Myers and Professor W.F. Barrett
published, in the _Journal of the Society for Psychical Research_, p.
102, the following statement: 'We have found no allegations of
_fraud_' (in Home) 'on which we should be justified in laying much
stress. Mr. Robert Browning has told to one of us' (Mr. Myers) 'the
circumstances which mainly led to that opinion of Home which was
expressed in _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_.' It appears that a lady (since
dead) repeated to Mr. Browning a statement made to her by a lady and
gentleman (since dead) as to their finding Home in the act of
experimenting with phosphorus on the production of 'spirit lights,'
'which (so far as Mr. Browning remembers) were to be rubbed round the
walls of the room, near the ceiling, so as to appear when the room was
darkened. This piece of evidence powerfully impressed Mr. Browning;
but it comes to us at third hand, without written record, and at a
distance of nearly forty years.'

Clearly this story is not evidence against Home.

But, several years ago, an eminent writer, whom I need not name,
published in a newspaper another version. Mr. Browning had told him,
he said, that, sitting with Home and Mrs. Browning (apparently alone,
these three) in a darkened room, he saw a white object rise above the
table. This Home represented as the phantasm of a child of Mr. and