Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 65, No. 402, April, 1849

The first section of Mr Craik's book extends over nearly a century, "that most picturesque of our English centuries which lies between the Reformation and the Great Rebellion," and owes its priority to its length and importance, not to chronological precedence, which is due rather to some of the narratives in the second volume. The history of the Lady Lettice Knollys, her marriages and her descendants, occupies nearly the whole volume, including much interesting matter relative to various noble English families, as well as to Queen Elizabeth, Amy Robsart, Antonio Perez, and other characters well known in history or romance. Here there is temptation enough to linger; but we pass on to a most interesting chapter of the second volume, which illustrates, as well and more briefly, the merits of Mr Craik's book. It is entitled The Old Percys– a name than which none is more thoroughly English, none more suggestive of high and chivalrous qualities. Mr Craik begins by a tilt at Romeo's fallacy of there being nothing in a name, instead of which, he says, "names have been in all ages among the most potent things in the world. They have stirred and swayed mankind, and still do so, simply as names, without any meaning being attached to them. Of two sounds, designating or indicating the same thing, the one shall, by its associations, raise an emotion of the sublime, the other of the ridiculous. There can hardly be a stronger instance of this than we have in the two paternal names, the assumed and the genuine one, of the family at present possessing the Northumberland title. The former, Percy, is a name for poetry to conjure with; it is itself poetry of a high and epic tone, and may be said to move the English heart 'more than the sound of a trumpet,' as Sidney tells us his was moved whenever he heard the rude old ballad in which it is celebrated; but when Canning, or whoever else it was, in the Anti-Jacobin audaciously came out with —

'Duke Smithson of NorthumberlandA vow to God did make,'

he set the town in a roar." The case is neatly made out, and the writer then investigates the etymology of the name of Percy. The popular version is, that a Scottish king, the great Malcolm Canmore, was slain in the latter part of the eleventh century whilst assaulting the castle of Alnwick, whose lord ran his spear into the monarch's eye, and thence derived the surname of Pierce-eye. This is so pretty and romantic a derivation that one is loath to relinquish it, but unfortunately the Percys were Percys fully two centuries before Malcolm's death. Geoffrey, son of Mainfred the Danish chieftain, accompanied Rollo in his invasion of France, and became lord of the town of Percy or Persy, in Lower Normandy, and this became his sur-name – originally sieur-name or lord-name – an appellation derived from territorial property. Two of the de Percys, fifth in descent from Geoffrey, followed William the Conqueror to England, where the elder of them became one of the greatest lords in the country. "About a hundred and twenty lordships in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and other parts, are set down in Domesday Book as his property. He was, of course, a baron of the realm. His family name being probably reserved for occasions of form and ceremony, he was familiarly known in his own day as Guillaume al gernons– that is, Will with the Whiskers – which puts us in possession of at least one point in the personal appearance of this founder of the English house of Percy. Hence Algernon became a common baptismal name among his descendants… Will with the Whiskers must have been a good fellow, if it be true, as we are told by an old writer, that his wife, Emma de Port, was the Saxon heiress of some of the lands bestowed upon him by the Conqueror, and that 'he wedded her in discharging of his conscience.'" We here observe a variance between Mr Craik and Mr Bernard Burke, who devotes more than one chapter to anecdotes of the house of Percy, which he states to have enjoyed an uninterrupted male descent from the date of the Conquest to the death of Jocelyn Percy, the eleventh earl, in 1670. Mr Craik, on the other hand, whilst noticing that the line has thrice ended in a female, and been revived through the marriage of the heiress, fixes the date of the first of these extinctions and revivals in 1168, or rather later, about a century after the Conquest, when the death, without male heirs, of the third Lord Percy, left the wealth and honours of the house to his two daughters. Maud, the eldest, died without issue; Agnes, the younger, married Jocelyn of Loraine, whose house was one of the most illustrious in Europe, boasting relationship with the dukes of Hainault, and collateral descent from the emperor Charlemagne, but whom she took for her husband only on condition of his assuming her ancestral name. Mr Craik gives Collins' Peerage as his authority; Mr Burke would probably refer us to his own: but we do not feel enough interest in the subject to attempt to decide where doctors of this eminence differ. Amongst his celebrated "Peerage Causes," Mr Burke gives some curious particulars of the claim made by a Dublin trunkmaker to the titles and estates of the Percys, on the extinction of the male line in 1670. This man, whether the blood of the Percys flowed in his veins or not, showed no small share of the pluck and boldness for which that family was so long distinguished, by upholding his pretensions for fifteen years – at first against the dowager Countess of Northumberland, and afterwards against the proud and powerful Duke of Somerset, who had married the heiress, Lady Elizabeth Percy. When it is remembered that this occurred in the reign of Charles II., whose tribunals were not renowned for their equity, (and when a long purse was often better than the clearest right,) and that the influence and position of the countess and duke gave them incalculable advantages, it may be thought that the box-builder from Ireland was almost as bold a man as the Hotspur he claimed for an ancestor. He got hard measure from the House of Lords, and was rebuked for presuming to trouble it. He tried the courts of law, suing persons for scandal who had stated him to be an impostor – an indirect way of establishing his descent. After one of these trials, Lord Hailes, dissatisfied with the decision of the court, which was unfavourable to the plaintiff, is stated to have said to Lord Shaftesbury, when entering his coach – "I verily believe he (James Percy) hath as much right to the earldom of Northumberland as I have to this coach and horses, which I have bought and paid for." In the reign of James II., Percy again petitioned the Lords, but ineffectually. His final effort was in the first year of William and Mary, when his petition was read and referred to a Committee of Privileges, whose report declared him insolent; and ultimately he was condemned to be brought "before the four courts in Westminster Hall, wearing a paper upon his breast, on which these words shall be written: The false and impudent pretender to the Earldom of Northumberland." This was accordingly done, and, thus disgraced and branded as a cheat, the unfortunate trunkmaker was heard of no more.

Connected with the early years of the heiress whose rights were thus disputed, are some singularly romantic incidents, of which a long account is given by both Burkes. Before the Lady Elizabeth Percy attained the age of sixteen, she was thrice a wife, and twice a widow. She was not yet thirteen when the ceremony of marriage was performed between her and the Earl of Ogle, a boy of the same age, who died within the year, leaving the heiress of Northumberland to be competed for by new suitors. Amongst these was Thomas Thynne, Esq., of Longleat in Wiltshire, known, from his great wealth, as Tom of Ten Thousand, member of parliament for his county, a man of weight in the country, and living in a style of great magnificence. He had been an intimate friend of the Duke of York, afterwards James II., but, having quarrelled with that prince, he turned Whig, and courted the Duke of Monmouth, who frequently visited him at his sumptuous mansion of Longleat, and to whom he made a present of a team of Oldenburg carriage – horses of remarkable beauty. Thynne was soon the accepted suitor of Lady Elizabeth Percy, and they were married in 1681, but separated immediately after the ceremony on account of the youth of the bride, who went abroad for a tour on the Continent.

"It was then, as some say, that she first met Count Konigsmark at the court of Hanover; but in this notion there is a confusion both of dates and persons. The count, in fact, appears to have seen her in England, and to have paid his addresses to her before she gave her hand, or had it given for her, to Thynne. On his rejection, he left the country; but that they met on the Continent there is no evidence or likelihood. Charles John von Konigsmark was a Swede by birth, but was sprung from a German family, long settled in the district called the Mark of Brandenburg, on the coast of the Baltic. The name of Konigsmark is one of the most distinguished in the military annals of Sweden throughout a great part of the seventeenth century." – (Celebrated Trials, p. 41.)

Count Charles John did honour, at a very early age, to the warlike reputation of his family, upon whose scutcheon he was subsequently to cast the shadow of a foul suspicion. When eighteen years old, he greatly distinguished himself in a cruise against the Turks, undertaken in company with the Knights of Malta. Early in 1681, he returned to England, and the probabilities are that it was then, during Lady Elizabeth's widowhood, that he became an aspirant for her hand. Her second marriage apparently destroyed the chance of the desperate Swede, but without extinguishing his hopes. In the month of February 1682, the position of the three personages of the drama was as follows: Lady Elizabeth, or Lady Ogle, as she was styled, was abroad; Konigsmark had been lost sight of, having gone none knew whither; Tom Thynne, with the heiress of Northumberland his own by legal title, if not in actual possession, was at the zenith of his personal and political prosperity. His friend Monmouth was the idol of the mob, the Duke of York had gone to Scotland to avoid the storm raised by the absurd popish plot, and by the murder of Sir Emondbury Godfrey; Shaftesbury had been released from the Tower, amidst acclamations and illuminations: party-spirit, in short, ran so high, and Thynne was so prominent a figure at the moment, that the crime to which he presently fell a victim has been thought by many to have been instigated by political enemies, at least as much as by a disappointed rival for the hand of the heiress of the Percys. Be that as it may, (and at this distance of time it were a hopeless undertaking to elucidate a deed which the tribunals and annalists of the day failed to clear up,) "on the night of Sunday, 12th February 1682, all the court end of London was startled by the news that Thynne had been shot passing along the public streets in his coach. The spot was towards the eastern extremity of Pall-Mall, directly opposite to St Alban's Street, – no longer to be found, but which occupied nearly the same site with the covered passage now called the Opera Arcade. St Alban's Place, which was at its northern extremity, still preserves the memory of the old name. King Charles, at Whitehall, might almost have heard the report of the assassin's blunderbuss; and so might Dryden, sitting in his favourite front-room on the ground-floor of his house, on the south side of Gerrard Street, also hard by, more than a couple of furlongs distant." Sir John Reresby, the magistrate and memoir-writer, took an active share in the arrests and examinations that followed, and gives the details of the affair. He was at court that evening, and declares the king to have been greatly shocked at news of the murder – "not only for horror of the action itself, (which was shocking to his natural disposition,) but also for fear of the turn the anti-court party might give thereto." Three persons were arrested – a Pole, a German, and a Swedish lieutenant; and Borosky, the Pole, declared that he came to England by the desire of Count Konigsmark, signified to him through his Hamburg agent, and that on his arrival the count informed him what he had to do, supplied him with weapons, and put him under the orders of a German captain, by whose command he fired into Mr Thynne's carriage. The murderers were determined their enterprise should not miscarry for want of arms, and got together an arsenal. "There were a blunderbuss, two swords, two pair of pistols, three pocket-pistols, &c., tied up together in a sort of sea-bed, and delivered to Dr Dubartin, a German doctor, who received them at his own house." Active search was made for Konigsmark, who had arrived in England incognito some days before the murder, and after a while he was discovered in hiding at Gravesend. The Duke of Monmouth and Lord Cavendish were particularly active in the affair, and a reward of £200 was offered for the count's apprehension. He was carried before the king. "I happened," says Reresby, "to be present upon this occasion, and observed that he appeared before his majesty with all the assurance imaginable. He was a fine person of a man, and I think his hair was the longest I ever saw." Nothing was elicited at this examination, which was very superficial, but on the 27th February the four accused persons were put on their trial at Hick's Hall. Konigsmark was acquitted for want of evidence (that of his three accomplices and servants not being receivable against him,) and by reason also, says Mr Peter Burke, of the more than ordinarily artful and favourable summing up of Chief-Justice Pemberton, who seemed determined to save him. The others were hanged in Pall-Mall, and Borosky, who fired the blunderbuss, was suspended in chains at Mile End. Although Konigsmark slipped through the fingers of justice, the moral conviction of his guilt was so strong, and the popular feeling so violent against him, that he was glad to leave England in all haste. "The high-spirited Lord Cavendish," says Mr Bernard Burke, "the friend and companion of the murdered Thynne, indignant at what he deemed a shameful evasion of justice, offered to meet Konigsmark in any part of the world, charge the guilt of blood upon him, and prove it with his sword. Granger records that the challenge was accepted, and that the parties agreed to fight on the sands of Calais, but before the appointed time arrived, Konigsmark declined the encounter." Such backwardness is rather inconsistent with the count's high reputation for bravery – somewhat inexplicable in the leader of the Maltese boarders, and in the man who subsequently greatly distinguished himself at the siege of Cambray and Gerona, at Navarin and Modon, and at the battle of Argoo, where he was either killed in fight, or died of a pleurisy brought on by over-exertion. On this last point authorities differ. It is not improbable, however, notwithstanding his approved valour, that conscience may have made a coward of him in the instance referred to by Granger, and that the man who never flinched before the Turk's scimitar or the Spaniard's toledo, may have shunned crossing his sword with the vengeful blade of Cavendish.

If, as may be supposed, it was Konigsmark's intention, by the assassination of Mr Thynne, to clear the way for his own pretensions to the hand of Lady Elizabeth, that part of his scheme was frustrated by the discovery of his complicity in the crime. There could be no hope of a renewal of the favour with which the lady has been said to have regarded the handsome Swede previously to her contract with Thynne – the work apparently of her restless matchmaking grandmother and guardian, rather than the result of any inclination of her own. Twice married, and still a maid, the Lady Ogle returned to England, immediately after the execution of her second husband's murderers, and soon (only two months afterward, we are told) she was led to the altar, for the third time, by Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, commonly known as the Proud Duke of Somerset, by reason of his inordinate arrogance and self-esteem. He outlived her, and married Lady Charlotte Finch, daughter of the Earl of Winchelsea. "Madam," he is reported to have said, with infinite indignation, to this lady, when she once ventured to tap him familiarly on the shoulder with her fan – "Madam, my first wife was a Percy, and she never would have dared to take such liberty." The Proud Duke, who not infrequently made himself a laughingstock by his fantastical assumption, attended the funerals of three sovereigns, and the coronation of five. On all such state occasions the precedence was his, the first peer of the realm (Duke of Norfolk) being a Roman Catholic. His only surviving son, out of seven borne him by his first duchess, left but one daughter, married to Sir Hugh Smithson, to whom the earldom of Northumberland descended, and who, in 1776, became the first duke of Northumberland.

Opposite the title-page of Mr Craik's second volume smiles the sweet face of Mary Tudor, the daughter, sister, and widow of kings, the wife of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, the grandmother of the hapless Lady Jane Grey. No English princess, so little remarkable for high mental qualities, occupies so conspicuous a place in our annals. Her life was a romance; and the portion of it passed in France, as the bride of the infirm Louis XII., has been more than once availed of by the novelist. But the truth is here far too picturesque for embellishment. The utmost efforts of fiction could scarcely enhance singularity of the chain of circumstances entwined with Mary's girlhood, in the course of which she was near becoming an empress, as she afterwards became Queen. In January 1506 Mary was eight years old, Philip, Archduke of Austria, and, in right of his wife, King of Castile, was compelled by stress of weather to put in at Falmouth, during a voyage from the Netherlands to Spain, whereupon Henry VII. detained him at his court, and would not let him go, till he had extorted his consent to a marriage between the infant princess and Prince Charles of Castile, afterwards the Emperor Charles V. Philip died in the autumn of the same year, but the marriage was not the less solemnised by proxy in London early in 1508, to the great contentment of Henry, to whose felicity, Bacon says, there was then nothing to be added. "Nevertheless, the marriage of Mary of England with the Spanish prince, though it had gone so far, went no farther; nor does her father seem to have counted upon the arrangement being carried out with absolute reliance. When he died, in 1509 he was found to have directed in his will that the sum of £50,000 should bestowed as a dower with Mary, whenever she should be married either to Charles, King of Castile, or to any other foreign prince. In October 1513, after the capture of Tournay by Henry VIII., it was stipulated by a new treaty, concluded at Lisle, between him and Maximilian Emperor of Austria, that Charles should marry the Princess Mary at Calais before the 15th May next." The match, however, hung fire on the part of the Austrian, who had been tempted by the offer for his grandson of the French princess Renée, and although nothing came of this project, it enabled the King of France to connect himself as closely with the royal family of England, as he had been desirous of doing with that of Castile, but in another manner. His queen, Anne of Bretagne, died just about that time, and a few months afterwards the decrepid valetudinarian of fifty-three proposed marriage with the blooming sister of Henry VIII., then in her seventeenth year. Mary, attaching apparently little importance to the contract with the Prince of Castile, had fixed her affections on the handsome and chivalrous Charles Brandon, her brother's favourite, and the best lance of his day.

"Le premier des rois fut un soldat heureux,"

says the French ballad; and Brandon, whose pedigree was a blank previously to his father's father, may be said to have had almost equal fortune. For if not a king himself, he was a queen's husband, and a king's brother-in-law. He must have been some years older than Mary, for he had already been twice married, and had been talked of as the proposed husband of various illustrious ladies, and amongst others, of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, whose heart he is said to have won by his prowess in a tournament. At last Mary Tudor cast her eyes upon him, apparently with the full approval of her brother, whose most intimate friend Brandon long had been, and who now created him Duke of Suffolk, in anticipation of his marriage with his sister. Just then came Louis XII.'s offer. "The temptation of seeing his sister queen of France," says Mr Craik, "was not to be resisted by Henry; and the prospect of such an elevation may not perhaps have been without its seductions for the princess herself: " an illiberal supposition, refuted, if there be aught in physiognomy, by Mr Craik's own artist. The owner of those frank, fair features can never have preferred ambition to love, a decrepid French king to a gallant English duke. She consented, however, to the alliance; and if there were tears and overruling in the matter, they are certainly not upon the record. Old Louis – who, although not much past what is generally the full vigour of life, had already a foot in the grave – had planned the marriage as a matter of policy, but soon became exceedingly excited by the accounts he got of Mary's great beauty. A letter from the Earl of Worcester, sent to Paris as her proxy at the ceremony of marriage, to Cardinal Wolsey, exhibits the French monarch in a fever of expectation, "devising new collars and goodly gear" for his bride. "He showed me," says the earl, "the goodliest and the richest sight of jewels that ever I saw. I assure you, all that I ever have seen is not to compare to fifty-six great pieces that I saw of diamonds and rubies, and seven of the greatest pearls that I have seen, besides a great number of other goodly diamonds, rubies, balais, and great pearls; and the worst of the second sort of stones to be priced, and cost two thousand ducats. There is ten or twelve of the principal stones that there hath been refused for one of them one hundred thousand ducats." It seemed as if Louis, diffident of his own powers of captivation, had resolved to buy his wife's affection with trinkets; and Lord Worcester, duly appreciating the glittering store, and overrating, perhaps, its power of conferring happiness, doubts not "but she will have a good life with him, with the grace of God." The respectable and uxorious old sovereign was too wise to hand over the entire treasure at once, and planned, as he told Worcester, to have "at many and divers times kisses and thanks for them." He accordingly doled them out in daily morsels, which, although minute enough when compared with the coffers' full of which Lord Worcester speaks, were yet sufficiently considerable to satisfy an ordinary appetite. On the day of their marriage, which took place at Abbéville, he gave her "a marvellous great pointed diamond, with a ruby almost two inches long, without fail." And the following day he bestowed upon her "a ruby two inches and a half long, and as big as a man's finger, hanging by two chains of gold at every end, without any foil; the value whereof few men could esteem." At the same time he packed off her English attendants, which at first greatly discomposed her, but after a time she appears to have become reconciled to it, when a new cause of embarrassment arose in the arrival at Paris of the Duke of Suffolk in the character of English ambassador. "The attachment understood to have so recently existed between her majesty and Suffolk was of course well-known in France. The story of the English chroniclers is, that Suffolk was on this account regarded with general jealousy and dislike by the French; and the Duke of Bretagne, in particular, is charged with having actually sought his life." – (Romance of the Peerage, vol. ii. p. 245.) The Duke of Bretagne, also called the Dauphin, was son-in-law of Louis, and afterwards Francis I. One feels unwilling to credit the imputation cast on so chivalrous a king. Mr Burke generalises the matter, making no mention of Francis, and attributing the foul play to "the French, envious of the success of Brandon." But Mr Burke, who will gossip by the hour about an apocryphal legend, huddles over the romantic career of Charles Brandon in half-a-dozen pages, and can hardly be looked upon as a serious authority. The alleged unfair attempt on Suffolk's life occurred on the occasion of a tournament, which began at Paris, on Sunday 12th November, "before the king and queen, who were on a goodly stage; and the queen stood so that all men might see her, and wondered at her beauty, and the king was feeble, and lay upon a couch for weakness." In this tourney, the Duke of Suffolk and Marquis of Dorset and other Englishmen bore a gallant part, doing, says a chronicler, "as well as the best of any other." And a trifle better, too, judging from results; but old Hall, in his quaintness, is a friend to anything but exaggeration. And Suffolk himself, in a letter to Wolsey, after the tournament, merely says, with praiseworthy modesty, "blessed be God, all our Englishmen sped well, as I am sure ye shall hear by other." He himself was the hero of the jousts. It was no bloodless contest, with bated weapons, but a right stern encounter, with sharp spears. "Divers," says the cool chronicler, in a parenthesis, "were slain, and not spoken of." The felony charged on Francis was, that on the second day of the tourney, when he himself, by reason of a hurt in the hand, was compelled to leave the lists, he "secretly had a certain German, who was the tallest and strongest man in all the court of France, brought and put in the place of another person, in the hope of giving Suffolk a check." The bulky champion met his match, and more. After several fierce encounters, "Suffolk, by pure strength, took his antagonist round the neck, and pummelled him so about the head that the blood issued out of his nose." This "coventry" practice, then adopted, we believe, for the first time, settled the German, who was conveyed away in lamentable plight – by the dauphin, Hall affirms, and secretly, lest he should be known. The supposed motive of Francis, in seeking Suffolk's life, was his passion for his father-in-law's bride, which Brantome and other French writers have asserted to have been reciprocated by Mary – a base lying statement, there can be little doubt. There is every reason to believe the French queen's conduct to have been irreproachable. At any rate, her husband found no fault with her, declaring, on the contrary, in a letter to Harry the Eighth, how greatly pleased and contented he was with her, and lauding at the same time, in the highest terms, his excellent cousin of Suffolk. Four days after writing this letter, and twelve weeks after his marriage, Louis, who was much troubled with gout, and who, for the sake of his young queen, had completely changed his habits, dining at the extravagantly late hour of noon, and remaining out of bed sometimes until nearly midnight, departed this life. Upon which event Mr Craik strikes another splinter out of the romantic lens through which we have always loved to contemplate Mary Tudor, by insinuating she may have been not quite pleased to lose the dazzling position of queen-consort of France; and that it would have been equally satisfactory to her if Suffolk and Louis had lingered a little longer – the one in the pangs of disappointed love, the other in those of the gout. But if a diadem had such charms for Mary, that of Spain was at her command, by Mr Craik's own confession. "Both the Emperor Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain would now have been glad to secure her hand for her old suitor the Prince of Castile." Now, as ever, her behaviour was correct, proving both good sense and good feeling. She remained several weeks in Paris without giving the least indication of an intention to marry again, although Wolsey had no sooner heard of her being a widow than he wrote to her on the subject of a second union. Of course, nobody expected she would allow the usual term of mourning to expire before bestowing her hand on Suffolk, for their mutual and long-standing attachment was well known. Exactly three months after the death of Louis, they were privately married. At the last moment Suffolk hesitated, through fear of offending Henry VIII.; and although Francis himself advised him to marry the queen, he still demurred, with a degree of irresolution hardly to have been expected in one of his adventurous character, until Mary herself took energetic measures, giving him four days, and no more, to make up his mind. Thus urged, he ran the risk, and had no cause to repent. Henry was easily reconciled to the marriage, which he had doubtless foreseen as inevitable; and Mary, the French queen, as she continued to sign herself, was happy with the husband of her choice until her early death at the age of thirty-five.