CHARLOTTE DE LA TREMOILLE, COUNTESS OF DERBY.*

[FIRST NOTICE.] MADAME DE Wirr has in the book before us supplied the general public with a readable and interesting volume of historical biography. The book is prepared with some artistic skill, and the incidents are pleasantly told, and with an evident desire to state the real facts without undue prejudice in favour of her heroine. The substratum of the book is the letters of the Countess to her mother, Charlotte de Nassau, and her sister-in-law, Marie de la Tour d'Auvergne, which, the editor tells us, have been lately discovered by their descendant, the present Due de la Tremoille. These letters are "very numerous, and yellow with age and damp. Many of them are in cypher, but the care of the Duchesse de In Tremoille, to whom most of them are addressed, has in all cases added the key. The dates would have been difficult to guess at, but that the same sisterly hand has marked them on the back of almost every letter." "The whole," Madame de Witt adds, "have been confided to her by M. is Due de la Tremoille." Such is the statement on the strength of which we are called on to accept these as genuine and authentic letters from one of the most remarkable women in the seventeenth century. It is fortunate that the name of their editor commands implicit confidence on this point, or we Should enter on such a discussion at a great disadvantage. Madame de Witt does not give us the letters in full, except in the ease of two juvenile effusions, and she gives as them in the form of an English translation. We should have preferred having the letters in their original French, accompanied by a translation if the orthography of the writer were so peculiar as to render such 27w Lady of Latham; being the Life and Original Ldlere of Charlotte (le la

an auxiliary necessary, and we cannot but regret that Madame de Witt has not given us them in full, unless she has some good, though unstated, reason to the contrary. No extracts, however skilfully interwoven with editorial matter,—and Madame de Witt has executed this self-imposed task in a very easy and agreeable manner,—can give us such an impression of the life of a

past generation as the perusal of the complete letters would supply. 'I 'he intercalary matter breaks the continuity of the impression,

and insensibly gives a modern air to the whole. It is unfortunate also that the editor should evidently derive her knowledge of the period only from secondary sources. This appears sufficiently from her mode of referring to individuals well known to historical students, but not to the general reader, whose names occur incidentally in the letters. Thus, Sir Theodore Mayerue, the celebrated Court physician of the reign of Charles I., being mentioned in one of the letters as "M. de Mayerne," Madame do Witt can only tell us in a note that he was "a medical man in whom Lady Derby placed great confidence." In one or two cases also there are some slight discrepancies as to dates, which may either arise from error in the editor or in the endorsement of the letters themselves. We conclude the occasional slips in the titles of English and Scotch noblemen are due to the French impossibility in that respect of the Countess herself, and not to the force of modern associations on the part of her editor, though Charlotte de in Tremoille is one of the last we should expect to find blundering in such matters in a country with which, though a foreigner, she had identified herself so thoroughly.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, however, the volume before us gives us the materials for forming for the first time a

reliable conception of the character of the heroine of Latham —or, as it is properly spelt, Lathein—House. Madame Guizot de Witt has a Frenchwoman's keen perception of special traits of character, and we have no fault to find with her separate comments on the characteristics of the Countess as they peep forth from time to time in the course of her letters.

She is not, however, quite so successful and reliable in the general judgment in which she sums up her special comments. Thus one object in the publication appears, from the preface, to have been the vindication of the character of the Countess from the supposed misrepresentation of Sir Walter Scott in his novel of Peveril of the Peak. Yet not only the letters themselves, but the incidental remarks of the editor, go far to justify the great novelist

in the main features of the character which he has drawn, and it is strange, in the face of these, to find Madame de Witt recurring

to the charge in her summary at the close of the volume, and laying down as a characteristic of the Countess that forgiveness of injuries the absence of which the editor herself has deplored in more than one of her comments on particular passages in the letters. Of course there is one great misstatement in Scott's pages,—which he himself avows as a novelist's licence for the purposes of his story,—that the Countess should be represented

as a fervent Roman Catholic, instead of a fervent French Protestant, as she really was ; but this does not materially affect the

substance of the character drawn, which,—with all deference to

Madame do Witt's judgment, —is not, as she states, that of a mere "queen of melodrama." Indeed, we must hold it to be a signal proof of the instincts of genius, that with such imperfect materials, Sir Walter approximated so closely to a true conception of the actual woman.

Charlotte de la Tremoille was the daughter of Claude do la Tromoille, Dug de Thouars, Peer of France, Prince of Tarente

and of Tahnont, and of Charlotte Brabantine de Nassau, daughter of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, by his third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier. This high lineage is the key-note to the character of the Countess of Derby. She never forgot that she was a grand-daughter of the great opponent of Roman Catholicism on the Continent, and she never forgot her father's high

nobility and her mother's princely rank. Though forced by the circumstances of her subsequent life to a political alliance with Catholics, and to the support of a Catholic Queen in opposition to the most fervent of the English Protestants, she never ceased to hate and dread the Church of Rome, and to deplore any approximation to a public toleration of its members. And amidst all the anxieties and uncertainties of her position in the year following the execution of Charles I., we find her throwingherself with the greatest eagerness into a point of etiquette which had arisen as to the right of her niece, Mademoiselle de la Tremoille, to sit at the French Court in the presence of Royalty. Nor could she ever forgive her eldest son for making only a very respectable, and not a noble, marriage-match. Charlotte de la TremoiLle's father had been one of the old Huguenot adherents of Henry of Navarre, but from the time of the conversion of the King to Catholicism he lived in a splended retirement at his country chateau in Poitou. Here, in 1601, Charlotte was born ; but her father dying when she was only three years old, she was brought up under the care of her mother, assisted by the wise counsels of that distinguished Protestant chief, M. du Plessis-Mornay. Her first letter that is preserved (to her mother) was written at the age of five or six, and gives an amusing sketch of the learned acquirements of a little Protestant high-born lady of those days. "Madame," the child writes, "since you went away I have become very good. Thank God, you will find me quite learned. I know seventeen Psalms, all the quatrains of Pibrac, all the huitains of Zamariel, and above all, I can talk Latin. My little brother is so pretty ! he could not be prettier ; when visitors come, he is quite enough to entertain them. It seems, Madame, a very long time since we saw you. Pray love me. M. de St. Christophe says you are well, for which I have thanked God. I pray to God for you. I humbly kiss the hands of my good aunt and of my little cousins.— I am, Madame, your very bumble and very obedient and good daughter, CHARLOTTE DE LA TREMOILLE." The writer of this letter, however, seems to have appreciated worldly vanities quite as much as learned exercises. "The numerous accounts preserved by the Due de la Tremoille's steward testify to her large expenditure and very decided taste for dress. Mademoiselle's jeweller and tailor fill an important place in the family budget." Court life at Paris and the Hague had probably, if we may judge from her expressions in later life, a much larger share in forming her tastes than her country home in Poitou. She is seldom out of heart with the world, except when fortune frowns on her, or her place of residence is distasteful to her. So her life seems to have been passed pleasantly enough until she had attained the age of twenty-five, when she was married at the Hague to young James Stanley, Lord Strange (eldest son of the Earl of Derby), a lad of twenty. From this time—the commencement of the reign of Charles I.—down to her death in 1664, the life of Charlotte de la Tremoille is bound up chiefly with English interests, though she never failed to feel and express the most hearty concern for the fortunes of Continental Protestantism, and of her relatives in France.

James Stanley, as far as his personal qualities were concerned, was in many respects a happy choice for the young Frenchwoman. He was not only handsome, accomplished, and brave, but free from the prevailing dissoluteness of the English Court, and with a considerable amount of religious feeling, which, no doubt, was much confirmed and deepened by the influence of his wife, whose Huguenot training had preserved her from contamination by the profligate French Court. That rigid Presbyterian antiquary, Sir Simonds d'Ewes, speaks of Lord Strange in the early part of 1642 as "a great countenancer of religion, and a constant practiser of it in his own family for many years." His married life was a most happy one, and there can be no doubt that his wife fully deserved the praise bestowed by him on her in the last hours of his life. "I acknowledge," he then wrote to her, " the great goodness of God to have given me such a wife as you ; so great an honour to my family, so excellent a companion to me, so plous, so much of all that can be said of good. I must confess it impossible to say enough thereof." The misfortune was that the husband and wife resembled each other as much in their failings, as they did in the excellent points of their characters. James Stanley, though above the average in respect of ability, and in the main strictly honourable and chivalrous, had an excess of aristocratic pride and an arbitrary disposition which made him many dangerous enemies and seriously curtailed his social influence. Clarendon tells us that he had the misfortune not to know how to treat his inferiors. His father, a man of but faintly-marked character, gave up to him at an early age the management of the family property ; and Lord Strange, though so much in accordance with the feeling of the popular party in respect of fervent hatred of Catholiciam and strictness of life, turned into enemies almost all his Puritan neighbours and many of his own dependents. His wife's pride of birth we have already mentioned, and if this did not manifest itself so much in actual insolence of demeanour to inferiors in rank, it is pretty evident, even from her own letters, that it led to a quiet assumption in her relations with others that everything was due from them to her, and nothing in return from her to them, which however natural to one so elevated in position, must have made her a bad counsellor to her husband on. this point. Thus both husband and wife appear to have taken it for granted that while they were at liberty to vilify and oppose the popular party on every occasion when they had the power, the latter were not only bound to extend to them constant forbearance, but were incredibly wicked if, when the House of Stanley lay at their mercy, they ventured to inflict on its members a very modified amount of chastisement. Nor, as we have said, was Lady Strange of a forgiving disposition when her peculiar prejudices were crossed ; and the very strength of mind and courage which made her the unbending defender of Lathom House and the obstinate keeper of the Isle of Man, must have intensified these faults of temperament and position. With her equals, no doubt, Charlotte de in Tremoille was a very charming and affectionate friend. Her letters to her sister-in-law, in which she shows how nicely she estimated the deference due to the wife of the head of her family, and her thoughtful and affectionate consideration for the feelings and fortunes of such of her children as were properly amenable to her parental authority, show what she could be in good society and her own family relations ; but we can well understand how Mr. Alexander Rigby, the Puritan lawyer and M.P., and the members of the Lancashire family of Birch did not imbibe the most friendly feelings towards their haughty neighbours the master and mistress of Lathom and Knowsley, and did not much scruple at doing them an ill turn when the opportunity offered. Here we must stop for the present. We propose next week to criticize briefly the leading documents in the interesting volume now before us.