BOOKS.

Q1 TEEN MARY OF MODENA.*

HENRY VIII., after his preliminary interview with Anne oft Cleves, the lady imported to serve as his fourth wife, let fall the criticism, "Flanders Mare!" George IV., when his poor Caroline of later evil fame was brought into his presence by the diplomatist who had escorted her from Brunswick, burst into the exclamation: " Harris, a glass of brandy !" James IL was happier in his choice. To accept as proof Wissing's taking picture in the National Portrait Gallery of Mary of Modena, or the more flattering likenesses by that Dutchman's countrymen, Lely and Xneller—evidence con- firmed by the testimony of Madame de Sevigue and other courtly experts—the tall, graceful Princess, with her black hair and eyes and Italian complexion, was physically fitted for any throne. If the present record of the beautiful Mary's life may not quite meet the requirements of the devotee of history as an "exact science," the thoughtful reader will enjoy the succession of archive documents and letters, most of them new, which, with their artistically inter- woven narrative text and comments, are valuable both as lively biography, and as additions to our knowledge of the time. Improbable as it may sound, we are ready to state on affidavit that the pages of the book are dated from first to last, and that the contents are fairly explanatory : Mr. Haile has only himself to thank if the extent of his researches is only appreciated by a minority of scholars,— instead of a bibliography we have a few lines of preface

hardly worth reading.

The death of Anne Hyde leaving her husband, the Duke of

York, with two daughters (our eventual Queen Mary of Orange and Anne of Denmark), but without a son, pressure was put upon James to contract a second marriage in the interests of the country, a lengthy catalogue of suitable candidates being drawn up, which was finally edited down to eleven entries. As the physiological statistics of the future wives could only be ascertained by personal observation, the Duke's Groom of the Stole, Lord Peterborough, was given a roving matri- monial commission, with injunctions to try to interview those ladies, and make "most impartial relations of their manners and dispositions." As the traveller proceeded his list of available consorts dwindled down towards zero. One damsel was snapped up by the Emperor Leopold II., some were fat or ugly, or otherwise not up to the Groom of the Stole's ideal, so that the competitive list at last only contained the name of Princess Mary Beatrice of Modena. But that young lady, then in her fifteenth year, being without worldly leanings, had already commenced a religious novitiate, and was deaf to the arguments by which the English courtier tried to per- suade her to exchange her eventual cloister life for a Royal career. The case would have been hopeless had not Pope Clement X. come to the rescue by informing Mary in a

Latin letter that, the Duke of York's desire to contract an alliance with Her Nobility having reached the Pontifical ears, he thanked the Father of Mercies for preparing "in the kingdom of England an ample harvest of joy." Her marriage would restore the orthodox faith, and he therefore exhorted her to lay aside her desire to embrace religious discipline, "reflecting that in the present occasion it opposes itself to the progress of religion." The Pope argued, as we shall see, from false assumptions, but they persuaded the lady, whose portraiture was subse- quently thus drawn by Lord Peterborough :—

" The Princess Mary of Este appear'd to be at this time Four- teen years of Age ; she was tall, and admirably shaped, her Complexion was of the last fairness, her Hair black as Jet, so were her Eyebrows and her Eyes; but the latter so full of light and sweetness so did they dazzle and charm too. There seemed given unto them from Nature, Sovereign Power ; Power to kill and power to save ; and in the whole turn of her Face, which was • Queen Mart of Modena; her Life and Lettere. By Martin Haile. With Photogravuro Illtistrations. London: J. Si. Dent and Co. [rie. nat.] of the most graceful oval could be framed, there was all the Features, all the Beauty, and all that could be great and charm- ing in any human Creature."

The Duke of York's marriage with "the fairest lady in the world " was celebrated by proxy. No wonder if, as the Groom of the Stole wrote, when the young Duchess was received by

her husband on the beach at Dover, "she took possession of his Heart as well as his Arms." His enthusiasm was not returned by the bride. Twenty-five years her senior, pitted with small-pox, always suffering from a terrific stammer, and destitute of the charm which popularised "our mutton-eating King," his brother Charles, his appearance could not turn the reluctant Italian girl's fancy to thoughts of love. Yet before long he became the object of her constant devotion.

Although Mary's personal attractions obtained general recognition in London, the persistent cyclone of political and religious disturbance which surrounded the Court in that

epoch made her social position precarious, so that the small minority of English Catholics who might be counted in our island remained altogether outside the sphere of her possibilities of protecting influence. Soon after her marriage came the imaginary anti-Catholic plot (probably invented by Lord Shaftesbury) batched by the infamous Titus Oates, whose charges of high treason included the reigning Queen Catherine of Braganza and the Duchess of York's private secretary, Coleman. Mary could not save him ; he was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and she wrote to her brother of Modena : "The state of all Catholics in this country moves one to pity; what is worse, some poor miserable beings, constrained by necessity, are abandoning our faith." After the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion in the Western counties, and the merciless incidents of Jeffreys's "bloody Assize," Mary was traduced on the ground that she had stooped to an intervention of another species. Dis- agreeing with Macaulay's account of the matter, Mr. Haile writes :—

"It was hardly to be expected that the Queen should escape her share of calumny, and the tale invented against her embraced worthy William Penn, the Quaker, this true friend of King James and of herself. Certain ladies of Taunton had been con- demned for receiving the Duke of Monmouth with rcyal honours. The King gave their pardon to the Queen's Maids of tionour, who sold it to the victims through the agency of a certain George Penn, a pardon-broker of the timo, and a man in no way related to William Penn. The Queen had nothing to do with the matter, and Macaulay's slander of Penn and of 'the rapacity of the Queen' was further improved upon by Victor Hugo 'nearly two centuries later into a sale of widows and daughters of traitors by Mary Beatrice to William Penn.'" The novel L'Homme qui Bit we have partly forgotten, but a look into the appropriate texts will convince any one that

our author, far from exaggerating, has here poured water into his wine. Macaulay's Mary of Modena is always an imaginary quantity : his denunciation of " her unprincely greediness and unwomanly cruelty" rests on a partisan satire of the time, no proof whatever being offered for the allegation that by purchasing a cargo of four hundred condemned rebels, and selling it back to the relatives, the Royal "raging, furious devil" pocketed a bonus of one thousand guineas. As to the Quaker, his case was settled by Hepworth Dixon's definite reply to the long note in the second edition of Macaulay's History.

Among the author's finds are letters of great value from Mary's Italian private secretary, Rizzi, to the Count of Modena ; the correspondence of Terrieri, the Grand Duke of

Tuscany's London agent ; the despatches of Hoffmann, the Imperial Envoy to our Court ; and other sources hitherto neglected. In view of this testimony, with other evidence,

our author refuses to see in James II. a brutal bigot who, if fortune had favoured him, would have brought us back to government by the thumbscrew and bonfire. Possibly James may not have been quite as odious a tyrant as the Whigs of his day painted him, but we do not believe that the main out- lines of Macaulay's picture are inaccurate. In any case, we are convinced that Mr. Haile goes too far in saying that if, for example, the Declaration of Indulgence was chiefly prompted by motives of self-interest, it was partly due to the King's desire that his subjects might enjoy liberty of conscience as stipulated by the Treaty of Breda. Again, what are we to think of the declaration that he was "a hundred years in advance of his generation in his love of tolerance and liberty of conscience" ? As Mr. Haile himself

admits, James's actions did not square with his Coronation oath, and his reiterated promises to maintain the rights of the Church of England. A few days after the Royal flight to France the Imperial Envoy, always an acute observer, wrote to Vienna some words to which we subjoin a sentence from a letter from the Duke of Tuscany's representative, who saddled Mary with the responsibility of the Stuart crash :— (a) "Whether he goes or stays, he will never be but the shadow of a King; to this pass have his weakness, his imprudent zeal for religion, and his credulity brought him ; and if ever there was a Prince surrounded by foolish, inexperienced, rash, and corrupt advisers, it has surely been he."

(b) "The King of England is a very good man, and the Queen his wife has ruined him ; having great control over him, she led him to make no account of the English nobility, and she made still less of the ladies of that country, which did her great harm,

and will render it difficult for them ever to trust her The King of England passes here for a very good Prince, but without that elevation of character which fame had attributed to him."

An exact observer of the attitude of the English fugitives on their arrival at St. Germains—viz., Madame de Sevigne- bestows many superlatives on Mary, who, she says, with her fascinations of person, imposing manner, and sensible talk, won all hearts, while her husband's cold manner and esprit commun were not suited to the atmosphere of Versailles. Another admirer was Madame de Maintenon, who, however, was credited with jealousy of the attractions which drew Louis XIV. to the beautiful fugitive.

Macaulay's rainbow rhetoric is at its best when be describes the reception of the exiles in France, and the splendours of Bourbon generosity with which they were installed by the munificent Roi Soleil at the Castle of Germains. Mr. Haile shows in his interesting, realistic manner that the domestic life of the visitors was now happier than it had been before. James had dropped his reines de la main gauche. Mary, whose earlier children had died in their infancy, never tired of her nursery, where the juvenile Prince of Wales —our " Old " Pretender—would be playing with his little sister, born at St. Germains, a girl of beauty, who only reached her twentieth year. James, plunging into rigours of austerity and penance, became a yearly visitor to the monastery of La Trappe. Mary, true to the aspirations of her Italian girlhood, indulged her sentiments of sanctity by " retreats " to the convent of Chaillot, exchanging leters with the nuns and their Mother-in-God on spiritual subjects. In the Whitehall days she had sometimes given James good advice on weighty occa- sions. For example, she objected to the nomination of the mischievous Jesuit, Father Petre, to the Privy Council, and to the prosecution of the Seven Bishops. During the protracted era of Jacobite plots for the restoration of the Stuarts, based on realities of French intervention and probabilities of support from those adventurous Sovereigns, Charles XII. and Peter the Great, the views of the ex-Queen were often less perspicacious. Surrounded at their Court by an army of Orangist spies, the Royal fugitives were always in an atmosphere of plots and counterplots, in which even men like Bolingbroke, Godolphin, and Marlborough were playing the game of double-faced treason. Where suspicion was wanted, the Stuart pair had as little perception of their dangers as they had in the time of Titus Oates. Once the nuns of Chaillot remonstrated with Mary on her way of thinking well of everybody and listening to hypocrites. Concerning her credulity the ex-Queen answered : "I cannot suspect evil, and I have not the spirit of Court intrigue."

After the death of James in 1701, his widow had before her nearly seventeen more years of life at St. Germains. Broken in body by an evil almost too great for womanly strength to bear, and embarrassed by poverty when the state of Louis XIV.'s purse made her pension receipts uncertain, she stuck to the cause of the " Chevalier St. George " with unflinching zeal. Defeat does not always imply folly in the vanquished. In justice to the maligned lady of the house of Este, let us remember that if she mistook fogs for dry land, so did the great Bolingbroke, who at the time of the fruitless campaign of Sherriffmuir was serving as James Edward's recognised Secretary of State. According to the trustworthy historian Gardiner, if the Old Pretender had but consented to the Jacobite proposal that he should turn Protestant, he would probably have followed his half-sisters, Mary and Anne, on the English throne.