'The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Sentence of death passed.'

'February 6, 1827. Sydney Gazette.

'George Worrall, convicted on Friday last of murder of F. Fisher, yesterday suffered the last penalty of the law. Till about 5 o'clock on the morning of his execution, he persisted in asserting his innocence, when he was induced to confess to a gentleman who had sat up with him during the night, that he alone had perpetrated the murder, but positively affirmed it was not his intention at the time to do so.'

We need not follow Worrall's attempts to explain away the crime as an accident. He admitted that 'he had intended to hang Lawrence and Cole.'

It is a curious case. WHY WAS NOBODY INTERROGATED ABOUT THE DISCOVERY, ON THE RAIL, OF BLOOD THREE MONTHS OLD, if not four months? What was the apparent date of the fire under the rail? How did the ghost-story get into circulation, and reach Mr. Montgomery Martin (1835)?

To suggest a solution of these problems, we have a precisely analogous case in England.

On October 25, 1828, one William Edden, a market-gardener, did not come home at night. His wife rushed into the neighbouring village, announcing that she had seen her husband's ghost; that he had a hammer, or some such instrument, in his hand; that she knew he had been hammered to death on the road by a man whose name she gave, one Tyler. Her husband was found on the road, between Aylesbury and Thame, killed by blows of a blunt instrument, and the wife in vain repeatedly invited the man, Joseph Tyler, to come and see the corpse. Probably she believed that it would bleed in his presence, in accordance with the old superstition. All this the poor woman stated on oath at an inquiry before the magistrates, reported in the Buckinghamshire county paper of August 29, 1829.

Here is her evidence, given at Aylesbury Petty Sessions, August 22, before Lord Nugent, Sir J. D. King, R. Brown, Esq., and others:

'"After my husband's corpse was brought home, I sent to Tyler, for some reasons I had, to come and see the corpse. I sent for him five or six times. I had some particular reason for sending for him which I never did divulge. . . . I will tell my reasons if you gentlemen ask me, in the face of Tyler, even if my life should be in danger for it. When I was ironing a shirt, on the Saturday night my husband was murdered, something came over me—something rushed over me—and I thought my husband came by me. I looked up, and I thought I heard the voice of my husband come from near my mahogany table, as I turned from my ironing. I ran out and said, 'Oh dear God! my husband is murdered, and his ribs are broken.' I told this to several of my neighbours. Mrs. Chester was the first to whom I told it. I mentioned it also at the Saracen's Head."

'Sir J. D. King.—"Have you any objection to say why you thought your husband had been murdered?"

'"No! I thought I saw my husband's apparition and the man that had done it, and that man was Tyler, and that was the reason I sent for him. . . . When my neighbours asked me what was the matter when I ran out, I told them that I had seen my husband's apparition. . . . When I mentioned it to Mrs. Chester, I said: 'My husband is murdered, and his ribs are broken; I have seen him by the mahogany table.' I did not tell her who did it. . . . I was always frightened, since my husband had been stopped on the road." (The deceased Edden had once before been waylaid, but was then too powerful for his assailants.) "In consequence of what I saw, I went in search of my husband, until I was taken so ill I could go no further."

'Lord Nugent.—"What made you think your husband's ribs were broken?"

'"He held up his hand like this" (holds up her arm), "and I saw a hammer, or something like a hammer, and it came into my mind that his ribs were broken."

'Sewell stated that the murder was accomplished by means of a hammer. The examination was continued on August 31 and September 13; and finally both prisoners were discharged for want of sufficient evidence. Sewell declared that he had only been a looker-on, and his accusations against Tyler were so full of prevarications that they were not held sufficient to incriminate him. The inquiry was again resumed on February 11, 1830, and Sewell, Tyler, and a man named Gardner were committed for trial.

'The trial (see "Buckingham Gazette," March 13, 1830) took place before Mr. Baron Vaughan and a grand jury at the Buckingham Lent Assizes, March 5, 1830; BUT IN THE REPORT OF MRS. EDDEN'S EVIDENCE NO MENTION IS MADE OF THE VISION.

'Sewell and Tyler were found guilty, and were executed, protesting their innocence, on March 8, 1830.

'Miss Browne, writing to us [Mr. Gurney] from Farnham Castle, in January 1884, gives an account of the vision which substantially accords with that here recorded, adding:—

'"The wife persisted in her account of the vision; consequently the accused was taken up, and, with some circumstantial evidence in addition to the woman's story, committed for trial by two magistrates—my father, Colonel Robert Browne, and the Rev. Charles Ackfield.

'"The murderer was convicted at the assizes, and hanged at Aylesbury.

'"It may be added that Colonel Browne was remarkably free from superstition, and was a thorough disbeliever in 'ghost stories.'"'*

*From Phantasms of the Living, Gurney and Myers, vol. ii. p. 586.

Now, in the report of the trial at assizes in 1830 there is not one word about the 'ghost,' though he is conspicuous in the hearing at petty sessions. The parallel to Fisher's case is thus complete. And the reason for omitting the ghost in a trial is obvious. The murderers of Sergeant Davies of Guise's, slain in the autumn of 1749 in Glenclunie, were acquitted by an Edinburgh jury in 1753 in face of overpowering evidence of their guilt, partly because two Highland witnesses deposed to having seen the ghost of the sergeant, partly because the jury were Jacobites. The prisoners' counsel, as one of them told Sir Walter Scott, knew that their clients were guilty. A witness had seen them in the act. But the advocate (Lockhart, a Jacobite) made such fun out of the ghost that an Edinburgh jury, disbelieving in the spectre, and not loving the House of Hanover, very logically disregarded also the crushing evidence for a crime which was actually described in court by an eye-witness.

Thus, to secure a view of the original form of the yarn of Fisher's Ghost, what we need is what we are not likely to get—namely, a copy of the depositions made before the bench of magistrates at Campbelltown in October 1826.

For my own part, I think it highly probable that the story of Fisher's Ghost was told before the magistrates, as in the Buckinghamshire case, and was suppressed in the trial at Sydney.

Worrall's condemnation is said to have excited popular discontent, as condemnations on purely circumstantial evidence usually do. That dissatisfaction would be increased if a ghost were publicly implicated in the matter, just as in the case of Davies's murder in 1749. We see how discreetly the wraith or ghost was kept out of the Buckinghamshire case at the trial, and we see why, in Worrall's affair, no questions were asked as to the discovery of sprinkled blood, not proved by analysis to be human, on the rail where Fisher's ghost was said to perch.

I had concluded my inquiry here, when I received a letter in which Mr. Rusden kindly referred me to his 'History of Australia' (vol. ii. pp. 44, 45). Mr. Rusden there gives a summary of the story, in agreement with that taken from the Sydney newspaper. He has 'corrected current rumours by comparison with the words of a trustworthy informant, a medical man, who lived long in the neighbourhood, and attended Farley [the man who saw Fisher's ghost] on his death-bed. He often conversed with Farley on the subject of the vision which scared him. . . . These facts are compiled from the notes of Chief-Justice Forbes, who presided at the trial, with the exception of the references to the apparition, which, although it led to the discovery of Fisher's body, could not be alluded to in a court of justice, or be adduced as evidence.'* There is no justice for ghosts.

*Thanks to the kindness of the Countess of Jersey, and the obliging researches of the Chief Justice of New South Wales, I have received a transcript of the judge's notes. They are correctly analysed by Mr. Rusden.

An Australian correspondent adds another example. Long after Fisher's case, this gentleman was himself present at a trial in Maitland, New South Wales. A servant-girl had dreamed that a missing man told her who had killed him, and where his body was concealed. She, being terrified, wanted to leave the house, but her mistress made her impart the story to the chief constable, a man known to my informant, who also knew, and names, the judge who tried the case. The constable excavated at the spot pointed out in the dream, unearthed the body, and arrested the criminal, who was found guilty, confessed, and was hanged. Not a word was allowed to be said in court about the dream. All the chief constable was permitted to say was, that 'from information received' he went to Hayes's farm, and so forth.

Here, then, are two parallels to Fisher's ghost, and very hard on psychical science it is that ghostly evidence should be deliberately burked through the prejudices of lawyers. Mr. Suttar, in his 'Australian Stories Retold' (Bathurst, 1887), remarks that the ghost is not a late mythical accretion in Fisher's story. 'I have the authority of a gentleman who was intimately connected with the gentleman who had the charge of the police when the murder was done, that Farley's story did suggest the search for the body in the creek.' But Mr. Suttar thinks that Farley invented the tale as an excuse for laying information. That might apply, as has been said, to Highland witnesses in 1753, but hardly to an Englishman in Australia. Besides, if Farley knew the facts, and had the ghost to cover the guilt of peaching, WHY DID HE NOT PEACH? He only pointed to a fence, and, but for the ingenious black Sherlock Holmes, the body would never have been found. What Farley did was not what a man would do who, knowing the facts of the crime, and lured by a reward of 20 pounds, wished to play the informer under cover of a ghost-story.

The case for the ghost, then, stands thus, in my opinion. Despite the silence preserved at the trial, Farley's ghost-story was really told before the discovery of Fisher's body, and led to the finding of the body. Despite Mr. Suttar's theory (of information laid under shelter of a ghost-story), Farley really had experienced an hallucination. Mr. Rusden, who knew his doctor, speaks of his fright, and, according to the version of 1836, he was terrified into an illness. Now, the hallucination indicated the exact spot where Fisher was stricken down, and left traces of his blood, which no evidence shows to have been previously noticed. Was it, then, a fortuitous coincidence that Farley should be casually hallucinated exactly at the one spot—the rail in the fence—where Fisher had been knocked on the head? That is the question, and the state of the odds may be reckoned by the mathematician.

As to the Australian servant-girl's dream about the place where another murdered body lay, and the dreams which led to the discovery of the Red Barn and Assynt murders, and (May 1903) to the finding of the corpse of a drowned girl at Shanklin, all these may be mere guesses by the sleeping self, which is very clever at discovering lost objects.



X. THE MYSTERY OF LORD BATEMAN



Ever and again, in the literary and antiquarian papers, there flickers up debate as to the Mystery of Lord Bateman. This problem in no way concerns the existing baronial house of Bateman, which, in Burke, records no predecessor before a knight and lord mayor of 1717. Our Bateman comes of lordlier and more ancient lineage. The question really concerns 'The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Illustrated by George Cruikshank, London: Charles Tilt, Fleet Street. And Mustapha Syried, Constantinople. MDCCCXXXIX.'

The tiny little volume in green cloth, with a design of Lord Bateman's marriage ceremony, stamped in gold, opens with a 'Warning to the Public, concerning the Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman.' The Warning is signed George Cruikshank, who, however, adds in a postscript: 'The above is not my writing.' The ballad follows, and then comes a set of notes, mainly critical. The author of the Warning remarks: 'In some collection of old English Ballads there is an ancient ditty, which, I am told, bears some remote and distant resemblance to the following Epic Poem.'

Again, the text of the ballad, here styled 'The Famous History of Lord Bateman,' with illustrations by Thackeray, 'plain' (the original designs were coloured), occurs in the Thirteenth Volume of the Biographical Edition of Thackeray's works. (pp. lvi-lxi).

The problems debated are: 'Who wrote the Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman, and who wrote the Notes?' The disputants have not shown much acquaintance with ballad lore in general.

First let us consider Mr. Thackeray's text of the ballad. It is closely affiliated to the text of 'The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman,' whereof the earliest edition with Cruikshank's illustrations was published in 1839.* The edition here used is that of David Bryce and Son, Glasgow (no date).

*There are undated cheap broadside copies, not illustrated, in the British Museum.

Mr. Blanchard Jerrold, in his 'Life of Cruikshank,' tells us that the artist sang this 'old English ballad' at a dinner where Dickens and Thackeray were present. Mr. Thackeray remarked: 'I should like to print that ballad with illustrations,' but Cruikshank 'warned him off,' as he intended to do the thing himself. Dickens furnished the learned notes. This account of what occurred was given by Mr. Walter Hamilton, but Mr. Sala furnished another version. The 'authorship of the ballad,' Mr. Sala justly observed, 'is involved in mystery.' Cruikshank picked it up from the recitation of a minstrel outside a pot-house. In Mr. Sala's opinion, Mr. Thackeray 'revised and settled the words, and made them fit for publication.' Nor did he confine himself to the mere critical work; he added, in Mr. Sala's opinion, that admired passage about 'The young bride's mother, who never before was heard to speak so free,' also contributing 'The Proud Young Porter,' Jeames. Now, in fact, both the interpellation of the bride's mamma, and the person and characteristics of the proud young porter, are of unknown antiquity, and are not due to Mr. Thackeray—a scholar too conscientious to 'decorate ' an ancient text. Bishop Percy did such things, and Scott is not beyond suspicion; but Mr. Thackeray, like Joseph Ritson, preferred the authentic voice of tradition. Thus, in the text of the Biographical Edition, he does not imitate the Cockney twang, phonetically rendered in the version of Cruikshank. The second verse, for example, runs thus:

Cruikshank:

He sail-ed east, he sail-ed vest, Until he came to famed Tur-key, Vere he vos taken and put to prisin, Until his life was quite wea-ry.

Thackeray:

He sailed East, and he sailed West, Until he came to proud Turkey, Where he was taken and put to prison, Until his life was almost weary.

There are discrepancies in the arrangement of the verses, and a most important various reading.

Cruikshank:

Now sevin long years is gone and past, And fourteen days vell known to me; She packed up all her gay clouthing, And swore Lord Bateman she would go see.

To this verse, in Cruikshank's book, a note (not by Cruikshank) is added:

'"Now sevin long years is gone and past, And fourteen days well known to me.

In this may be recognised, though in a minor degree, the same gifted hand that portrayed the Mussulman, the pirate, the father, and the bigot, in two words ("This Turk").

'"The time is gone, the historian knows it, and that is enough for the reader. This is the dignity of history very strikingly exemplified."'

That note to Cruikshank's text is, like all the delightful notes, if style is evidence, not by Dickens, but by Thackeray. Yet, in his own text, with an exemplary fidelity, he reads: 'And fourteen days well known to THEE.' To whom? We are left in ignorance; and conjecture, though tempting, is unsafe. The reading of Cruikshank, 'vell known to ME'—that is, to the poet—is confirmed by the hitherto unprinted 'Lord Bedmin.' This version, collected by Miss Wyatt Edgell in 1899, as recited by a blind old woman in a workhouse, who had learned it in her youth, now lies before the present writer. He owes this invaluable document to the kindness of Miss Wyatt Edgell and Lady Rosalind Northcote. Invaluable it is, because it proves that Lord Bateman (or Bedmin) is really a volkslied, a popular and current version of the ancient ballad. 'Famed Turkey' becomes 'Torquay' in this text, probably by a misapprehension on the part of the collector or reciter. The speech of the bride's mother is here omitted, though it occurs in older texts; but, on the whole, the blind old woman's memory has proved itself excellent. In one place she gives Thackeray's reading in preference to that of Cruikshank, thus:

Cruikshank:

Ven he vent down on his bended knee.

Thackeray:

Down on his bended knees fell he.

Old Woman:

Down on his bended knee fell he.

We have now ascertained the following facts: Cruikshank and Thackeray used a text with merely verbal differences, which was popular among the least educated classes early in last century. Again, Thackeray contributed the notes and critical apparatus to Cruikshank's version. For this the internal evidence of style is overpowering: no other man wrote in the manner and with the peculiar humour of Mr. Titmarsh. In the humble opinion of the present writer these Notes ought to be appended to Mr. Thackeray's version of 'Lord Bateman.' Finally, Mr. Sala was wrong in supposing that Mr. Thackeray took liberties with the text received from oral tradition.

What was the origin of that text? Professor Child, in the second part of his 'English and Scottish Popular Ballads'* lays before us the learning about Lord Bateman, Lord Bedmin, Young Bicham, Young Brechin, Young Bekie, Young Beichan and Susie Pie (the heroine, Sophia, in Thackeray), Lord Beichan, Young Bondwell, and Markgraf Backenweil; for by all these names is Lord Bateman known. The student must carefully note that 'Thackeray's List of Broadsides,' cited, is NOT by Mr. W. M. Thackeray.

*Pt. ii. p. 454 et seq., and in various other places.

As the reader may not remember the incidents in the Thackeray, Cruikshank, and Old Woman version (which represents an ancient ballad, now not so much popularised as vulgarised), a summary may be given. Lord Bateman went wandering: 'his character, at this time, and his expedition, would seem to have borne a striking resemblance to those of Lord Byron. . . . SOME foreign country he wished to see, and that was the extent of his desire; any foreign country would answer his purpose—all foreign countries were alike to him.'- -(Note, apud Cruikshank.) Arriving in Turkey (or Torquay) he was taken and fastened to a tree by his captor. He was furtively released by the daughter of 'This Turk.' 'The poet has here, by that bold license which only genius can venture upon, surmounted the extreme difficulty of introducing any particular Turk, by assuming a foregone conclusion in the reader's mind; and adverting, in a casual, careless way, to a Turk hitherto unknown as to an old acquaintance. . . . "THIS Turk he had" is a master-stroke, a truly Shakespearian touch'—(Note.) The lady, in her father's cellar ('Castle,' Old Woman's text), consoles the captive with 'the very best wine,' secretly stored, for his private enjoyment, by the cruel and hypocritical Mussulman. She confesses the state of her heart, and inquires as to Lord Bateman's real property, which is 'half Northumberland.' To what period in the complicated mediaeval history of the earldom of Northumberland the affair belongs is uncertain.

The pair vow to be celibate for seven years, and Lord Bateman escapes. At the end of the period, Sophia sets out for Northumberland, urged, perhaps, by some telepathic admonition. For, on arriving at Lord Bateman's palace (Alnwick Castle?), she summons the proud porter, announces herself, and finds that her lover has just celebrated a marriage with another lady. In spite of the remonstrances of the bride's mamma, Lord Bateman restores that young lady to her family, observing

She is neither the better nor the worse for me.

So Thackeray and Old Woman. Cruikshank prudishly reads,

O you'll see what I'll do for you and she.

'Lord Bateman then prepared another marriage, having plenty of superfluous wealth to bestow upon the Church.'—(Note.) All the rest was bliss.

The reader may ask: How did Sophia know anything about the obscure Christian captive? WHY did she leave home exactly in time for his marriage? How came Lord Bateman to be so fickle? The Annotator replies: 'His lordship had doubtless been impelled by despair of ever recovering his lost Sophia, and a natural anxiety not to die without leaving an heir to his estate.' Finally how was the difficulty of Sophia's religion overcome?

To all these questions the Cockney version gives no replies, but the older forms of the ballad offer sufficient though varying answers, as we shall see.

Meanwhile one thing is plain from this analysis of the pot-house version of an old ballad, namely, that the story is constructed out of fragments from the great universal store of popular romance. The central ideas are two: first, the situation of a young man in the hands of a cruel captor (often a god, a giant, a witch, a fiend), but here—a Turk. The youth is loved and released (commonly through magic spells) by the daughter of the gaoler, god, giant, witch, Turk, or what not. In Greece, Jason is the Lord Bateman, Medea is the Sophia, of the tale, which was known to Homer and Hesiod, and was fully narrated by Pindar. THE OTHER YOUNG PERSON, the second bride, however, comes in differently, in the Greek. In far-off Samoa, a god is the captor.* The gaoler is a magician in Red Indian versions.**

*Turner's 'Samoa,' p. 102. **For a list, though an imperfect one, of the Captor's Daughter story, see the Author's Custom and Myth, pp. 86-102.

As a rule, in these tales, from Finland to Japan, from Samoa to Madagascar, Greece and India, the girl accompanies her lover in his flight, delaying the pursuer by her magic. In 'Lord Bateman' another formula, almost as widely diffused, is preferred.

The old true love comes back just after her lover's wedding. He returns to her. Now, as a rule, in popular tales, the lover's fickleness is explained by a spell or by a breach of a taboo. The old true love has great difficulty in getting access to him, and in waking him from a sleep, drugged or magical.

The bloody shirt I wrang for thee, The Hill o' Glass I clamb for thee, And wilt thou no waken and speak to me?

He wakens at last, and all is well. In a Romaic ballad the deserted girl, meeting her love on his wedding-day, merely reminds him of old kindness. He answers—

Now he that will may scatter nuts, And he may wed that will, But she that was my old true love Shall be my true love still.

This incident, the strange, often magically caused oblivion of the lover, whose love returns to him, like Sophia, at, or after, his marriage, is found in popular tales of Scotland, Norway, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and the Gaelic Western Islands. It does not occur in 'Lord Bateman,' where Mr. Thackeray suggests probable reasons for Lord Bateman's fickleness. But the world-wide incidents are found in older versions of 'Lord Bateman,' from which they have been expelled by the English genius for the commonplace.

Thus, if we ask, how did Sophia at first know of Bateman's existence? The lovely and delicate daughter of the Turk, doubtless, was unaware that, in the crowded dungeons of her sire, one captive of wealth, noble birth, and personal fascination, was languishing. The Annotator explains: 'She hears from an aged and garrulous attendant, her only female adviser (for her mother died while she was yet an infant), of the sorrows and sufferings of the Christian captive.' In ancient versions of the ballad another explanation occurs. She overhears a song which he sings about his unlucky condition. This account is in Young Bekie (Scottish: mark the name, Bekie), where France is the scene and the king's daughter is the lady. The same formula of the song sung by the prisoner is usual. Not uncommon, too, is a TOKEN carried by Sophia when she pursues her lost adorer, to insure her recognition. It is half of her broken ring. Once more, why does Sophia leave home to find Bateman in the very nick of time? Thackeray's version does not tell us; but Scottish versions do. 'She longed fu' sair her love to see.' Elsewhere a supernatural being, 'The Billy Blin,' or a fairy, clad in green, gives her warning. The fickleness of the hero is caused, sometimes, by constraint, another noble 'has his marriage,' as his feudal superior, and makes him marry, but only in form.

There is a marriage in yonder hall, Has lasted thirty days and three, The bridegroom winna bed the bride, For the sake o' one that's owre the sea.

In this Scottish version, by the way, occurs—

Up spoke the young bride's mother, Who never was heard to speak so free,

wrongly attributed to Mr. Thackeray's own pen.

The incident of the magical oblivion which comes over the bridegroom occurs in Scandinavian versions of 'Lord Bateman' from manuscripts of the sixteenth century.* Finally, the religious difficulty in several Scottish versions is got over by the conversion and baptism of Sophia, who had professed the creed of Islam. That all these problems in 'Lord Bateman' are left unsolved is, then, the result of decay. The modern vulgar English version of the pot-house minstrel (known as 'The Tripe Skewer,' according to the author of the Introduction to Cruikshank's version) has forgotten, has been heedless of, and has dropped the ancient universal elements of folk- tale and folk-song.

*Child, ii. 459-461.

These graces, it is true, are not too conspicuous even in the oldest and best versions of 'Lord Bateman.' Choosing at random, however, we find a Scots version open thus:

In the lands where Lord Beichan was born, Among the stately steps o' stane, He wore the goud at his left shoulder, But to the Holy Land he's gane.

That is not in the tone of the ditty sung by the Tripe Skewer. Again, in his prison,

He made na his moan to a stock, He made na it to a stone, But it was to the Queen of Heaven That he made his moan.

The lines are from a version of the North of Scotland, and, on the face of it, are older than the extirpation of the Catholic faith in the loyal North. The reference to Holy Land preserves a touch of the crusading age. In short, poor as they may be, the Scottish versions are those of a people not yet wholly vulgarised, not yet lost to romance. The singers have 'half remembered and half forgot' the legend of Gilbert Becket (Bekie, Beichan), the father of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Gilbert, in the legend, went to Holy Land, was cast into a Saracen's prison, and won his daughter's heart. He escaped, but the lady followed him, like Sophia, and, like Sophia, found and wedded him; Gilbert's servant, Richard, playing the part of the proud young porter. Yet, as Professor Child justly observes, the ballad 'is not derived from the legend,' though the legend as to Gilbert Becket exists in a manuscript of about 1300. The Bateman motive is older than Gilbert Becket, and has been attached to later versions of the adventures of that hero. Gilbert Becket about 1300 was credited with a floating, popular tale of the Bateman sort, and out of his legend, thus altered, the existing ballads drew their 'Bekie' and 'Beichan,' from the name of Becket.

The process is: First, the popular tale of the return of the old true love; that tale is found in Greece, Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, Faroe, Spain, Germany, and so forth. Next, about 1300 Gilbert Becket is made the hero of the tale. Next, our surviving ballads retain a trace or two of the Becket form, but they are not derived from the Becket form. The fancy of the folk first evolved the situations in the story, then lent them to written literature (Becket's legend, 1300), and thirdly, received the story back from written legend with a slight, comparatively modern colouring.

In the dispute as to the origin of our ballads one school, as Mr. T. F. Henderson and Professor Courthope, regard them as debris of old literary romances, ill-remembered work of professional minstrels.* That there are ballads of this kind in England, such as the Arthurian ballads, I do not deny. But in my opinion many ballads and popular tales are in origin older than the mediaeval romances, as a rule. As a rule the romances are based on earlier popular data, just as the 'Odyssey' is an artistic whole made up out of popular tales. The folk may receive back a literary form of its own ballad or story, but more frequently the popular ballad comes down in oral tradition side by side with its educated child, the literary romance on the same theme.

Cf. The Queen's Marie.

Mr. Henderson has answered that the people is unpoetical. The degraded populace of the slums may be unpoetical, like the minstrel named 'Tripe Skewer,' and may deprave the ballads of its undegraded ancestry into such modern English forms as 'Lord Bateman.' But I think of the people which, in Barbour's day, had its choirs of peasant girls chanting rural snatches on Bruce's victories, or, in still earlier France, of Roland's overthrow. If THEIR songs are attributed to professional minstrels, I turn to the Greece of 1830, to the Finland of to-day, to the outermost Hebrides of to-day, to the Arapahoes of Northern America, to the Australian blacks, among all of whom the people are their own poets and make their own dirges, lullabies, chants of victory, and laments for defeat. THESE peoples are not unpoetical. In fact, when I say that the people has been its own poet I do not mean the people which goes to music halls and reads halfpenny newspapers. To the true folk we owe the legend of Lord Bateman in its ancient germs; and to the folk's degraded modern estate, crowded as men are in noisome streets and crushed by labour, we owe the Cockney depravation, the Lord Bateman of Cruikshank and Thackeray. Even that, I presume, being old, is now forgotten, except by the ancient blind woman in the workhouse. To the workhouse has come the native popular culture—the last lingering shadow of old romance. That is the moral of the ballad of Lord Bateman.

In an article by Mr. Kitton, in Literature (June 24, 1899, p. 699), this learned Dickensite says: 'The authorship of this version' (Cruikshank's) 'of an ancient ballad and of the accompanying notes has given rise to much controversy, and whether Dickens or Thackeray was responsible for them is still a matter of conjecture, although what little evidence there is seems to favour Thackeray.'

For the ballad neither Thackeray nor Dickens is responsible. The Old Woman's text settles that question: the ballad is a degraded Volkslied. As to the notes, internal evidence for once is explicit. The notes are Thackeray's. Any one who doubts has only to compare Thackeray's notes to his prize poem on 'Timbuctoo.'

The banter, in the notes, is academic banter, that of a university man, who is mocking the notes of learned editors. This humour is not the humour of Dickens, who, however, may very well have written the Introduction to Cruikshank's version. That morceau is in quite a different taste and style. I ought, in fairness, to add the following note from Mr. J. B. Keene, which may be thought to overthrow belief in Thackeray's authorship of the notes:—

Dear Sir,—Your paper in the 'Cornhill' for this month on the Mystery of Lord Bateman interested me greatly, but I must beg to differ from you as to the authorship of the Notes, and for this reason.

I have before me a copy of the first edition of the 'Loving Ballad' which was bought by my father soon after it was issued. At that time—somewhere about 1840—there was a frequent visitor at our house, named Burnett, who had married a sister of Charles Dickens, and who gave us the story of its production.

He said, as you state, that Cruikshank had got the words from a pot- house singer, but the locality he named was Whitechapel,* where he was looking out for characters. He added that Cruikshank sung or hummed the tune to him, and he gave it the musical notation which follows the preface. He also said that Charles Dickens wrote the notes. His personal connection with the work and his relation to Dickens are, I think, fair evidence on the question.

I am, dear Sir, Yours truly, J. B. KEENE.

Kingsmead House, 1 Hartham Road, Camden Road, N., Feb. 13,1900.

Mr. Keene's evidence may, perhaps, settle the question. But, if Dickens wrote the Introduction, that might be confused in Mr. Burnett's memory with the Notes, from internal evidence the work of Thackeray. If not, then in the Notes we find a new aspect of the inexhaustible humour of Dickens. It is certain, at all events, that neither Dickens nor Thackeray was the author of the 'Loving Ballad.'

P.S.—The preface to the ballad says Battle Bridge.



XI. THE QUEEN'S MARIE



Little did my mother think That day she cradled me What land I was to travel in, Or what death I should die.

Writing to Mrs. Dunlop on January 25, 1790, Burns quoted these lines, 'in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart.' Mr. Carlyle is said, when young, to have written them on a pane of glass in a window, with a diamond, adding, characteristically, 'Oh foolish Thee!' In 1802, in the first edition of 'The Border Minstrelsy,' Scott cited only three stanzas from the same ballad, not including Burns's verse, but giving

Yestreen the Queen had four Maries, The night she'll hae but three, There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael and me.

In later editions Sir Walter offered a made-up copy of the ballad, most of it from a version collected by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

It now appeared that Mary Hamilton was the heroine, that she was one of Queen Marie's four Maries, and that she was hanged for murdering a child whom she bore to Darnley. Thus the character of Mary Hamilton was 'totally lost,' and Darnley certainly 'had not sufficient for two.' Darnley, to be sure, told his father that 'I never offended the Queen, my wife, in meddling with any woman in thought, let be in deed,' and, whether Darnley spoke truth or not, there was, among the Queen's Maries, no Mary Hamilton to meddle with, just as there was no Mary Carmichael.

The Maries were attendant on the Queen as children ever since she left Scotland for France. They were Mary Livingstone (mentioned as 'Lady Livinston' in one version of the ballad),* who married 'John Sempill, called the Dancer,' who, says Laing, 'acquired the lands of Beltree, in Renfrewshire.'**

*Child, vol. iii. p. 389. **Laing's Knox, ii. 415, note 3.

When Queen Mary was a captive in England she was at odds with the Sempill pair about some jewels of hers in their custody. He was not a satisfactory character, he died before November 1581. Mary Fleming, early in 1587, married the famous William Maitland of Lethington, 'being no more fit for her than I to be a page,' says Kirkcaldy of Grange. Her life was wretched enough, through the stormy career and sad death of her lord. Mary Beaton, with whom Randolph, the English ambassador, used to flirt, married, in 1566, Ogilvy of Boyne, the first love of Lady Jane Gordon, the bride of Bothwell. Mary Seaton remained a maiden and busked the Queen's hair during her English captivity. We last hear of her from James Maitland of Lethington, in 1613, living at Rheims, very old, 'decrepid,' and poor. There is no room in the Four for Mary Hamilton, and no mention of her appears in the records of the Court.

How, then, did Mary Hamilton find her way into the old ballad about Darnley and the Queen?

To explain this puzzle, some modern writers have denied that the ballad of 'The Queen's Marie' is really old; they attribute it to the eighteenth century. The antiquary who launched this opinion was Scott's not very loyal friend, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. According to him, a certain Miss Hambledon (no Christian name is given), being Maid of Honour to the Empress Catherine of Russia, had three children by an amour, and murdered all three. Peter the Great caused her to be, not hanged, but decapitated. Sharpe took his facts from 'a German almanac,' and says: 'The Russian tragedy must be the original.' The late Professor Child, from more authentic documents, dates Miss Hambledon's or Hamilton's execution on March 14, 1719. At that time, or nearly then, Charles Wogan was in Russia on a mission from the Chevalier de St. George (James III.), and through him the news might reach Scotland. Mr. Courthope, in his 'History of English Poetry,' followed Sharpe and Professor Child, and says: 'It is very remarkable that one of the very latest of the Scottish popular ballads should be one of the very best.'

The occurrence would not only be remarkable, but, as far as possibility goes in literature, would be impossible, for several reasons. One is that neither literary men nor mere garreteers and makers of street ballads appear, about 1719-1730, to have been capable of recapturing the simplicity and charm of the old ballad style, at its best, or anything near its best. There is no mistaking the literary touch in such ballads as Allan Ramsay handled, or in the imitation named 'Hardyknute ' in Allan's 'Tea Table Miscellany,' 1724. 'It was the first poem I ever learned, the last I shall ever forget,' said Scott, and, misled by boyish affection, he deemed it 'just old enough,' 'a noble imitation.'* But the imitation can deceive nobody, and while literary imitators, as far as their efforts have reached us, were impotent to deceive, the popular Muse, of 1714-1730, was not attempting deception. Ballads of the eighteenth century were sarcastic, as in those on Sheriffmuir and in Skirving's amusing ballad on Preston Pans, or were mere doggerel, or were brief songs to old tunes. They survive in print, whether in flying broadsides or in books, but, popular as is 'The Queen's Marie,' in all its many variants (Child gives no less than eighteen), we do not know a single printed example before Scott's made-up copy in the 'Border Minstrelsy.' The latest ballad really in the old popular manner known to me is that of 'Rob Roy,' namely, of Robin Oig and James More, sons of Rob Roy, and about their abduction of an heiress in 1752. This is a genuine popular poem, but in style and tone and versification it is wholly unlike 'The Queen's Marie.' I scarcely hope that any one can produce, after 1680, a single popular piece which could be mistaken for a ballad of or near Queen Mary's time.

*Lockhart, i. 114, x. 138.

The known person least unlike Mr. Courthope's late 'maker' was 'Mussel-mou'd Charlie Leslie,' 'an old Aberdeenshire minstrel, the very last, probably, of the race,' says Scott. Charlie died in 1782. He sang, and sold PRINTED ballads. 'Why cannot you sing other songs than those rebellious ones?' asked a Hanoverian Provost of Aberdeen. 'Oh ay, but—THEY WINNA BUY THEM!' said Charlie. 'Where do you buy them?' 'Why, faur I get them cheapest.' He carried his ballads in 'a large harden bag, hung over his shoulder.' Charlie had tholed prison for Prince Charles, and had seen Provost Morison drink the Prince's health in wine and proclaim him Regent at the Cross of Aberdeen. If Charlie (who lived to be a hundred and two) composed the song, 'Mussel-mou'd Charlie ' ('this sang Charlie made hissel''), then this maker could never have produced 'The Queen's Marie,' nor could any maker like him. His ballads were printed, as any successful ballad of 1719 would probably have been, in broadsides.* Against Mr. Child and Mr. Courthope, then, we argue that, after 1600, a marked decadence of the old ballad style set in- -that the old style (as far as is known) died soon after Bothwell Brig (1679), in the execrable ballads of both sides, such as 'Philiphaugh,' and that it soon was not only dead as a form in practical use, but was entirely superseded by new kinds of popular poetry, of which many examples survive, and are familiar to every student. How, or why, then, should a poet, aiming at popularity, about 1719-1730, compose 'The Queen's Marie' in an obsolete manner? The old ballads were still sung, indeed; but we ask for proof that new ballads were still composed in the ancient fashion.

*See, for example, Mr. Macquoid's Jacobite Songs and Ballads, pp. 424, 510, with a picture of Charlie.

Secondly, WHY, and how tempted, would a popular poet of 1719 transfer a modern tragedy of Russia to the year 1563, or thereabouts? His public would naturally desire a ballad gazette of the mournful new tale, concerning a lass of Scottish extraction, betrayed, tortured, beheaded, at the far-off court of a Muscovite tyrant. The facts 'palpitated with actuality,' and, since Homer's day, 'men desire' (as Homer says) 'the new songs' on the new events. What was gained by going back to Queen Mary? Would a popular 'Musselmou'd Charlie' even know, by 1719, the names of the Queen's Maries? Mr. Courthope admits that 'he may have been helped by some ballad,' one of those spoken of, as we shall see, by Knox. If that ballad told the existing Marian story, what did the 'maker' add? If it did NOT, what did he borrow? No more than the names could he borrow, and no more than the name 'Hamilton' from the Russian tragedy could he add. One other thing he might be said to add, the verses in which Mary asks 'the jolly sailors' not to

'Let on to my father and mother But that I'm coming hame.'

This passage, according to Mr. Courthope, 'was suggested partly by the fact of a Scotswoman being executed in Russia.' C. K. Sharpe also says: 'If Marie Hamilton was executed in Scotland, it is not likely' (why not?) 'that her relations resided beyond seas.' They MAY have been in France, like many another Hamilton! Mr. Child says: 'The appeal to the sailors shows that Mary Hamilton dies in a foreign land—not that of her ancestors.' Yet the ballad makes her die in or near the Canongate! Moreover, the family of the Mary Hamilton of 1719 had been settled in Russia for generations, and were reckoned of the Russian noblesse. The verses, therefore, on either theory, are probably out of place, and are perhaps an interpolation suggested to some reciter (they only occur in some of the many versions) by a passage in 'The Twa Brithers.'*

*Child, i. 439.

We now reach the most important argument for the antiquity of 'The Queen's Marie.' Mr. Courthope has theoretically introduced as existing in, or after, 1719, 'makers' who could imitate to deception the old ballad style. Now Maidment remarks that 'this ballad was popular in Galloway, Selkirkshire, Lanarkshire, and Aberdeen, AND THE VERY STRIKING DISCREPANCIES GO FAR TO REMOVE EVERY SUSPICION OF FABRICATION.' Chambers uses (1829) against Sharpe the same argument of 'universal diffusion in Scotland.' Neither Mr. Child nor Mr. Courthope draws the obvious inferences from the extraordinary discrepancies in the eighteen variants. Such essential discrepancies surely speak of a long period of oral recitation by men or women accustomed to interpolate, alter, and add, in the true old ballad manner. Did such rhapsodists exist after 1719? Old Charlie, for one, did not sing or sell the old ballads. Again, if the ballad (as it probably would be in 1719) was PRINTED, or even if it was not, could the variations have been evolved between 1719 and 1802?

These variations are numerous, striking, and fundamental. In many variants even the name of the heroine does not tally with that of the Russian maid of honour. That most important and telling coincidence wholly disappears. In a version of Motherwell's, from Dumbartonshire, the heroine is Mary Myle. In a version known to Scott ('Minstrelsy,' 1810, iii. 89, note), the name is Mary Miles. Mr. Child also finds Mary Mild, Mary Moil, and Lady Maisry. This Maisry is daughter of the Duke of York! Now, the Duke of York whom alone the Scottish people knew was James Stuart, later James II. Once more the heroine is daughter of the Duke of Argyll, therefore a Campbell. Or she is without patronymic, and is daughter of a lord or knight of the North, or South, or East, and one of her sisters is a barber's wife, and her father lives in England!—(Motherwell.) She, at least, might invoke 'Ye mariners, mariners, mariners!' (as in Scott's first fragment) not to carry her story. Now we ask whether, after the ringing tragedy of Miss Hamilton in Russia, in the year of grace 1719, contemporaries who heard the woeful tale could, between 1719 and 1820, call the heroine—(1) Hamilton; (2) Mild, Moil, Myle, Miles; (3) make her a daughter of the Duke of York, or of the Duke of Argyll, or of lords and of knights from all quarters of the compass, and sister-in-law to an English barber, also one of the Queen's 'serving-maids.' We at least cannot accept those numerous and glittering contradictions as corruptions which could be made soon after the Russian events, when the true old ballad style was dead.

We now produce more startling variations. The lover is not only 'the King,' 'the Prince,' Darnley, 'the highest Stuart o' a',' but he is also that old offender, 'Sweet Willie,' or he is Warrenston (Warriston?). Mary is certainly not hanged (the Russian woman was beheaded) away from her home; she dies in Edinburgh, near the Tolbooth, the Netherbow, the Canongate, and—

O what will my three brothers say When they COME HAME frae sea, When they see three locks o' my yellow hair Hinging under a gallows tree?

It is impossible here to give all the variations. Mary pulls, or does not pull, or her lover pulls, the leaf of the Abbey, or 'savin,' or other tree; the Queen is 'auld,' or not 'auld;' she kicks in Mary's door and bursts the bolts, or does nothing so athletic and inconsistent with her advanced age. The heroine does, or does not, appeal vainly to her father. Her dress is of all varieties. She does, or does not, go to the Tolbooth and other places. She is, or is not, allured to Edinburgh, 'a wedding for to see.' Her infanticide is variously described, or its details are omitted, and the dead body of the child is found in various places, or not found at all. Though drowned in the sea, it is between the bolster and the wall, or under the blankets! She expects, or does not expect, to be avenged by her kin. The king is now angry, now clement—inviting Mary to dinner! Mary is hanged, or (Buchan's MS.) is not hanged, but is ransomed by Warrenston, probably Johnston of Warriston! These are a few specimens of variations in point of fact: in language the variations are practically countless. How could they arise, if the ballad is later than 1719?

We now condescend to appeal to statistics. We have examined the number of variants published by Mr. Child in his first six volumes, on ballads which have, or may have, an historical basis. Of course, the older and more popular the ballads, the more variants do we expect to discover—time and taste producing frequent changes. Well, of 'Otterburn' Mr. Child has five versions; of the 'Hunting of the Cheviot' he has two, with minor modifications indicated by letters from the 'lower case.' Of 'Gude Wallace' he has eight. Of 'Johnnie Armstrong' he has three. Of 'Kinmont Willie' he has one. Of 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray' he has two. Of 'Johnnie Cock' he has thirteen. Of 'Sir Patrick Spens' he has eighteen. And of 'The Queen's Marie' (counting Burns's solitary verse and other brief fragments) Mr. Child has eighteen versions or variants

Thus a ballad made, ex hypothesi Sharpiana, in or after 1719, has been as much altered in oral tradition as the most popular and perhaps the oldest historical ballad of all, 'Sir Patrick Spens,' and much more than any other of the confessedly ancient semi- historical popular poems. The historical event which may have suggested 'Sir Patrick Spens' is 'plausibly,' says Mr. Child, fixed in 1281: it is the marriage of Margaret of Scotland to Eric, King of Norway. Others suggest so late a date as the wooing of Anne of Denmark by James VI. Nothing is known. No wonder, then, that in time an orally preserved ballad grows rich in variants. But that a ballad of 1719 should, in eighty modern non-balladising years, become as rich in extant variants, and far more discrepant in their details, as 'Sir Patrick Spens' is a circumstance for which we invite explanation.

Will men say, 'The later the ballad, the more it is altered in oral tradition'? If so, let them, by all means, produce examples! We should, on this theory, have about a dozen 'Battles of Philiphaugh,' and at least fifteen 'Bothwell Brigs,' a poem, by the way, much in the old manner, prosaically applied, and so recent that, in art at least, it was produced after the death of the Duke of Monmouth, slain, it avers, by the machinations of Claverhouse! Of course we are not asking for exact proportions, since many variants of ballads may be lost, but merely for proof that, the later a ballad is, the more variants of it occur. But this contention is probably impossible, and the numerous variations in 'The Queen's Marie' are really a proof of long existence in oral tradition, and contradict the theory espoused by Mr. Child, who later saw the difficulty involved in his hypothesis.

This argument, though statistical, is, we think, conclusive, and the other considerations which we have produced in favour of the antiquity of 'The Queen's Marie' add their cumulative weight.

We have been, in brief, invited to suppose that, about 1719, a Scot wrote a ballad on an event in contemporary Russian Court life; that (contrary to use and wont) he threw the story back a century and a half; that he was a master of an old style, in the practice of his age utterly obsolete and not successfully imitated; that his poem became universally popular, and underwent, in eighty years, even more vicissitudes than most other ballads encounter in three or five centuries. Meanwhile it is certain that there had been real ancient ballads, contemporary with the Marian events—ballads on the very Maries two or three of whom appear in the so-called poem of 1719; while exactly the same sort of scandal as the ballad records had actually occurred at Queen Mary's Court in a lower social rank. The theory of Mr. Child is opposed to our whole knowledge of ballad literature, of its age, decadence (about 1620-1700), and decease (in the old kind) as a popular art.

To agree with Mr. Child, we must not only accept one great ballad- poet, born at least fifty years too late; we must not only admit that such a poet would throw back his facts for a century and a half; but we must also conceive that the balladising humour, with its ancient methods, was even more vivacious in Scotland for many years after 1719 than, as far as we know, it had ever been before. Yet there is no other trace known to us of the existence of the old balladising humour and of the old art in all that period. We have no such ballad about the English captain shot by the writer's pretty wife, none about the bewitched son of Lord Torphichen, none about the Old Chevalier, or Lochiel, or Prince Charlie: we have merely Shenstone's 'Jemmy Dawson' and the Glasgow bellman's rhymed history of Prince Charles. In fact, 'Jemmy Dawson' is a fair instantia contradictoria as far as a ballad by a man of letters is to the point. Such a ballad that age could indeed produce: it is not very like 'The Queen's Marie'! No, we cannot take refuge in 'Townley's Ghost' and his address to the Butcher Cumberland:—

Imbrued in bliss, imbathed in case, Though now thou seem'st to lie, My injured form shall gall thy peace, And make thee wish to die!

THAT is a ballad of the eighteenth century, and it is not in the manner of 'The Queen's Marie.'

These considerations, now so obvious to a student of the art of old popular poetry, if he thinks of the matter, could not occur to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. He was a great collector of ballads, but not versed in, or interested in, their 'aesthetic'—in the history and evolution of ballad-making. Mr. Child, on the other hand, was the Grimm or Kohler of popular English and Scottish poetry. Our objections to his theory could scarcely have been collected in such numbers, without the aid of his own assortment of eighteen versions or fragments, with more lectiones variae. But he has not allowed for the possible, the constantly occurring, chance of coincidence between fancy and fact; nor, perhaps, has he reflected on the changed condition of ballad poetry in the eighteenth century, on the popular love of a new song about a new event, and on the entire lack of evidence (as far as I am aware) for the existence of ballad-poets in the old manner during the reign of George I. The ballad-reading public of 1719 would have revelled in a fresh ballad of a Scottish lass, recently betrayed, tortured, and slain far away by a Russian tyrant. A fresh ballad on Queen Mary's Court, done in the early obsolete manner, would, on the other hand, have had comparatively little charm for the ballad-buying lieges in 1719. The ballad-poet had thus in 1719 no temptation to be 'archaistic,' like Mr. Rossetti, and to sing of old times. He had, on the contrary, every inducement to indite a 'rare new ballad' on the last tragic scandal, with its poignant details, as of Peter kissing the dead girl's head.

The hypothesis of Mr. Child could only be DEMONSTRATED incorrect by proving that there was no Russian scandal at all, or by producing a printed or manuscript copy of 'The Queen's Marie' older than 1719. We can do neither of these things; we can only give the reader his choice of two improbabilities—(a) that an historical event, in 1718-19, chanced to coincide with the topic of an old ballad; (b) that, contrary to all we know of the evolution of ballads and the state of taste, a new popular poem on a fresh theme was composed in a style long disused,* was offered most successfully to the public of 1719, and in not much more than half a century was more subjected to alterations and interpolations than ballads which for two or three hundred years had run the gauntlet of oral tradition.

*A learned Scots antiquary writes to me: 'The real ballad manner hardly came down to 1600. It was killed by the Francis Roos version of the Psalms, after which the Scottish folk of the Lowlands cast everything into that mould.' I think, however, that 'Bothwell Brig' is a true survival of the ancient style, and there are other examples, as in the case of the ballad on Lady Warriston's husband murder.

As for our own explanation of the resemblance between the affair of Miss Hamilton, in 1719, and the ballad story of Mary Hamilton (alias Mild, Myle, Moil, Campbell, Miles, or Stuart, or anonymous, or Lady Maisry), we simply, with Scott, regard it as 'a very curious coincidence.' On the other theory, on Mr. Child's, it is also a curious coincidence that a waiting-woman of Mary Stuart WAS hanged (not beheaded) for child-murder, and that there WERE written, simultaneously, ballads on the Queen's Maries. Much odder coincidences than either have often, and indisputably, occurred, and it is not for want of instances, but for lack of space, that we do not give examples.

Turning, now, to a genuine historic scandal of Queen Mary's reign, we find that it might have given rise to the many varying forms of the ballad of 'The Queen's Marie.' There is, practically, no such ballad; that is, among the many variants, we cannot say which comes nearest to the 'original' lay of the frail maid and her doom. All the variants are full of historical impossibilities, due to the lapses of memory and the wandering fancy of reciters, altering and interpolating, through more than two centuries, an original of which nothing can now be known. The fancy, if not of the first ballad poet who dealt with a real tragic event, at least of his successors in many corners of Scotland, raised the actors and sufferers in a sad story, elevating a French waiting-maid to the rank of a Queen's Marie, and her lover, a French apothecary, to the place of a queen's consort, or, at lowest, of a Scottish laird.

At the time of the General Assembly which met on Christmas Day 1563, a French waiting-maid of Mary Stuart, 'ane Frenche woman that servit in the Queenis chalmer,' fell into sin 'with the Queenis awin hipoticary.' The father and mother slew the child, and were 'dampned to be hangit upoun the publict streit of Edinburgh.' No official report exists: 'the records of the Court of Justiciary at this time are defective,' says Maidment, and he conjectures that the accused may have been hanged without trial, 'redhand.' Now the Queen's apothecary must have left traces in the royal account-books. No writer on the subject has mentioned them. I myself have had the Records of Privy Council and the MS. Treasurer's Accounts examined, with their statement of the expenses of the royal household. The Rev. John Anderson was kind enough to undertake this task, though with less leisure than he could have desired. There is, unluckily, a gap of some months in 1563. In June 1560, Mr. Anderson finds mention of a 'medicinar,' 'apoticarre,' 'apotigar,' but no name is given, and the Queen was then in France. One Nicholas Wardlaw of the royal household was engaged, in 1562, to a Miss Seton of Parbroath, but it needed a special royal messenger to bring the swain to the altar. 'Ane appotigar' of 1562 is mentioned, but not named, and we hear of Robert Henderson, chirurgeon, who supplied powders and odours to embalm Huntley. There is no trace of the hanging of any 'appotigar,' or of any one of the Queen's women, 'the maidans,' spoken of collectively. So far, the search for the apothecary has been a failure. More can be learned from Randolph's letter to Cecil (December 31, 1563), here copied from the MS. in the Public Record Office. The austerity of Mary's Court, under Mr. Knox, is amusingly revealed:—

'For newes yt maye please your honour to knowe that the Lord Treasurer of Scotlande for gettinge of a woman with chylde muste vpon Sondaye nexte do open penance before the whole congregation and mr knox mayke the sermonde. Thys my Lord of murraye wylled me to wryte vnto you for a note of our greate severitie in punyshynge of offenders. THE FRENCHE POTTICARIE AND THE WOMAN HE GOTTE WITH CHYLDE WERE BOTHE HANGED THYS PRESENT FRIDAYE. Thys hathe made myche sorrowe in our Courte. Maynie evle fortunes we have had by our Frenche fowlkes, and yet I feare we love them over well.'

After recording the condemnation of the waiting-woman and her lover, Knox tells a false story about 'shame hastening the marriage' of Mary Livingstone. Dr. Robertson, in his 'Inventories of Queen Mary,' refutes this slander, which he deems as baseless as the fables against Knox's own continence. Knox adds: 'What bruit the Maries and the rest of the danseris of the Courte had, the ballads of that age did witness, quhilk we for modesteis sake omit.' Unlucky omission, unfortunate 'modestei'! From Randolph's Letters it is known that Knox, at this date, was thundering against 'danseris.' Here, then, is a tale of the Queen's French waiting- woman hanged for murder, and here is proof that there actually were ballads about the Queen's Maries. These ladies, as we know from Keith, were, from the first, in the Queen's childhood, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seatoun, Mary Beatoun, and Mary Fleming.

We have, then, a child-murder, by a woman of the Queen, we have ballads about her Maries, and, as Scott says, 'the tale has suffered great alterations, as handed down by tradition, the French waiting- woman being changed into Mary Hamilton, and the Queen's apothecary into Henry Darnley,' who, as Mr. Child shows, was not even in Scotland in 1563. But gross perversion of contemporary facts does not prove a ballad to be late or apocryphal. Mr. Child even says that accuracy in a ballad would be very 'suspicious.' Thus, for example, we know, from contemporary evidence, that the murder of the Bonny Earl Murray, in 1592, by Huntley, was at once made the topic of ballads. Of these, Aytoun and Mr. Child print two widely different in details: in the first, Huntley has married Murray's sister; in the second, Murray is the lover of the Queen of James VI. Both statements are picturesque; but the former is certainly, and the latter is probably, untrue. Again, 'King James and Brown,' in the Percy MS., is accepted as a genuine contemporary ballad of the youth of gentle King Jamie. James is herein made to say to his nobles,—

'My grandfather you have slaine, And my own mother you hanged on a tree.'

Even if we read 'father' (against the manuscript) this is absurd. James V. was not 'slaine,' neither Darnley nor Mary was 'hanged on a tree.' Ballads are always inaccurate; they do not report events, so much as throw into verse the popular impression of events, the magnified, distorted, dramatic rumours. That a ballad-writer should promote a Queen's tirewoman into a Queen's Marie, and substitute Darnley (where HE is the lover, which is not always) for the Queen's apothecary, is a license quite in keeping with precedent. Mr. Child, obviously, would admit this. In producing a Marie who never existed, the 'maker' shows the same delicacy as Voltaire, when he brings into 'Candide' a Pope who never was born.

Finally, a fragment of a variant of the ballad among the Abbotsford MSS.* does mention an apothecary as the lover of the heroine, and, so far, is true to historical fact, whether the author was well informed, or merely, in the multitude of variations, deviated by chance into truth.

There can, on the whole, be no reasonable doubt that the ballad is on an event in Scotland of 1563, not of 1719, in Russia, and Mr. Child came to hold that this opinion was, at least, the more probable.**

*Child, vol. iv. p. 509. **Ibid., vol. v. pp. 298, 299.



XII. THE SHAKESPEARE-BACON IMBROGLIO*



The hypothesis that the works of Shakespeare were written by Bacon has now been before the world for more than forty years. It has been supported in hundreds of books and pamphlets, but, as a rule, it has been totally neglected by scholars. Perhaps their indifference may seem wise, for such an opinion may appear to need no confutation. 'There are foolisher fellows than the Baconians,' says a sage—'those who argue against them.' On the other hand, ignorance has often cherished beliefs which science has been obliged reluctantly to admit. The existence of meteorites, and the phenomena of hypnotism, were familiar to the ancient world, and to modern peasants, while philosophy disdained to investigate them. In fact, it is never really prudent to overlook a widely spread opinion. If we gain nothing else by examining its grounds, at least we learn something about the psychology of its advocates. In this case we can estimate the learning, the logic, and the general intellect of people who form themselves into Baconian Societies, to prove that the poems and plays of Shakespeare were written by Bacon. Thus a light is thrown on the nature and origin of popular delusions.

*(1) 'Bacon and Shakespeare,' by William Henry Smith (1857); (2) 'The Authorship of Shakespeare,' by Nathaniel Holmes (1875); (3) 'The Great Cryptogram,' by Ignatius Donnelly (1888); (4) 'The Promus of Formularies and Elegancies of Francis Bacon,' by Mrs. Henry Pott (1883); (5) 'William Shakespeare,' by Georg Brandes (1898); (6) 'Shakespeare,' by Sidney Lee (in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1897); (7) 'Shakespeare Dethroned' (in Pearson's Magazine, December 1897); (8) 'The Hidden Lives of Shakespeare and Bacon,' by W. G. Thorpe, F.S.A. (1897). (9) 'The Mystery of William Shakespeare,' by Judge Webb (1902).

The Baconian creed, of course, is scouted equally by special students of Bacon, special students of Shakespeare, and by almost all persons who devote themselves to sound literature. It is equally rejected by Mr. Spedding, the chief authority on Bacon; by Mr. H. H. Furness, the learned and witty American editor of the 'Variorum Shakespeare;' by Dr. Brandes, the Danish biographer and critic; by Mr. Swinburne, with his rare knowledge of Elizabethan and, indeed, of all literature; and by Mr. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare's latest biographer. Therefore, the first point which strikes us in the Baconian hypothesis is that its devotees are nobly careless of authority. We do not dream of converting them, but it may be amusing to examine the kind of logic and the sort of erudition which go to support an hypothesis not freely welcomed even in Germany.

The mother of the Baconian theory (though others had touched a guess at it) was undeniably Miss Delia Bacon, born at Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1811. Miss Bacon used to lecture on Roman history, illustrating her theme by recitations from Macaulay's 'Lays.' 'Her very heart was lacerated,' says Mr. Donnelly, 'and her womanly pride wounded, by a creature in the shape of a man—a Reverend (!) Alexander MacWhorter.' This Celtic divine was twenty-five, Miss Bacon was thirty-five; there arose a misunderstanding; but Miss Bacon had developed her Baconian theory before she knew Mr. MacWhorter. 'She became a monomaniac on the subject,' writes Mr. Wyman, and 'after the publication and non-success of her book she lost her reason WHOLLY AND ENTIRELY.' But great wits jump, and, just as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace simultaneously evolved the idea of Natural Selection, so, unconscious of Miss Delia, Mr. William Henry Smith developed the Baconian verity.

From the days of Mr. William Henry Smith, in 1856, the great Baconian argument has been that Shakespeare could not conceivably have had the vast learning, classical, scientific, legal, medical, and so forth, of the author of the plays. Bacon, on the other hand, and nobody else, had this learning, and had, though he concealed them, the poetic powers of the unknown author. Therefore, prima facie, Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. Mr. Smith, as we said, had been partly anticipated, here, by the unlucky Miss Delia Bacon, to whose vast and wandering book Mr. Hawthorne wrote a preface. Mr. Hawthorne accused Mr. Smith of plagiarism from Miss Delia Bacon; Mr. Smith replied that, when he wrote his first essay (1856), he had never even heard the lady's name. Mr. Hawthorne expressed his regret, and withdrew his imputation. Mr. Smith is the second founder of Baconomania.

Like his followers, down to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke, and General Butler, and Mr. Atkinson, who writes in 'The Spiritualist,' and Mrs. Gallup, and Judge Webb, Mr. Smith rested, first, on Shakespeare's lack of education, and on the wide learning of the author of the poems and plays. Now, Ben Jonson, who knew both Shakespeare and Bacon, averred that the former had 'small Latin and less Greek,' doubtless with truth. It was necessary, therefore, to prove that the author of the plays had plenty of Latin and Greek. Here Mr. John Churton Collins suggests that Ben meant no more than that Shakespeare was not, in the strict sense, a scholar. Yet he might read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, with ease and pleasure, and might pick out the sense of Greek books by the aid of Latin translations. To this view we return later.

Meanwhile we shall compare the assertions of the laborious Mr. Holmes, the American author of 'The Authorship of Shakespeare' (third edition, 1875), and of the ingenious Mr. Donnelly, the American author of 'The Great Cryptogram.' Both, alas! derive in part from the ignorance of Pope. Pope had said: 'Shakespeare follows the Greek authors, and particularly Dares Phrygius.' Mr. Smith cites this nonsense; so do Mr. Donnelly and Mr. Holmes. Now the so-called Dares Phrygius is not a Greek author. No Greek version of his early mediaeval romance, 'De Bello Trojano,' exists. The matter of the book found its way into Chaucer, Boccaccio, Lydgate, Guido de Colonna, and other authors accessible to one who had no Greek at all, while no Greek version of Dares was accessible to anybody.* Some recent authors, English and American, have gone on, with the credulity of 'the less than half educated,' taking a Greek Dares for granted, on the authority of Pope, whose Greek was 'small.' They have clearly never looked at a copy of Dares, never known that the story attributed to Dares was familiar, in English and French, to everybody. Mr. Holmes quotes Pope, Mr. Donnelly quotes Mr. Holmes, for this Greek Dares Phrygius. Probably Shakespeare had Latin enough to read the pseudo-Dares, but probably he did not take the trouble.

*See Brandes, William Shakespeare, ii. 198-202.

This example alone proves that men who are not scholars venture to pronounce on Shakespeare's scholarship, and that men who take absurd statements at second hand dare to constitute themselves judges of a question of evidence and of erudition.

The worthy Mr. Donnelly then quotes Mr. Holmes for Shakespeare's knowledge of the Greek drama. Turning to Mr. Holmes (who takes his motto, if you please, from Parmenides), we find that the author of 'Richard II.' borrowed from a Greek play by Euripides, called 'Hellene,' as did the author of the sonnets. There is, we need not say, no Greek play of the name of 'Hellene.' As Mr. Holmes may conceivably mean the 'Helena' of Euripides, we compare Sonnet cxxi. with 'Helena,' line 270. The parallel, the imitation of Euripides, appears to be—

By their dark thoughts my deeds must not be shown,

with—

Prooton men ouk ons adikoz eimi duskleez,^

which means, 'I have lost my reputation though I have done no harm.' Shakespeare, then, could not complain of calumny without borrowing from 'Hellene,' a name which only exists in the fancy of Mr. Nathaniel Holmes. This critic assigns 'Richard II.,' act ii., scene 1, to 'Hellene' 512-514. We can find no resemblance whatever between the three Greek lines cited, from the 'Helena,' and the scene in Shakespeare. Mr. Holmes appears to have reposed on Malone, and Malone may have remarked on fugitive resemblances, such as inevitably occur by coincidence of thought. Thus the similarity of the situations of Hamlet and of Orestes in the 'Eumenides' is given by similarity of legend, Danish and Greek. Authors of genius, Greek or English, must come across analogous ideas in treating analogous topics. It does not follow that the poet of 'Hamlet' was able to read AEschylus, least of all that he could read him in Greek.

^Anglicised version of the author's original Greek text.

The 'Comedy of Errors' is based on the 'Menaechmi' of Plautus. It does not follow that the author of the 'Comedy of Errors' could read the 'Menaechmi' or the 'Amphitryon,' though Shakespeare had probably Latin enough for the purpose. The 'Comedy of Errors' was acted in December 1594. A translation of the Latin play bears date 1595, but this may be an example of the common practice of post-dating a book by a month or two, and Shakespeare may have seen the English translation in the work itself, in proof, or in manuscript. In those days MSS. often circulated long before they were published, like Shakespeare's own 'sugared sonnets.' However, it is highly probable that Shakespeare was equal to reading the Latin of Plautus.

In 'Twelfth Night' occurs—

Like the Egyptian thief, at point of death, kill what I love.

Mr. Donnelly writes: 'This is an allusion to a story from Heliodorus's "AEthiopica." I do not know of any English translation of it in the time of Shakespeare.' The allusion is, we conceive, to Herodotus, ii. 121, the story of Rhampsinitus, translated by 'B. R.' and published in 1584. In 'Macbeth' we find—

All our yesterdays have LIGHTED fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, BRIEF CANDLE.

This is 'traced,' says Mr. Donnelly, 'to Catullus.' He quotes:—

Soles occidere et redire possunt; Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, Nox est perpetuo una dormienda.

Where is the parallel? It is got by translating Catullus thus:—

The LIGHTS of heaven go out and return; When once our BRIEF CANDLE goes out, One night is to be perpetually slept.

But soles are not 'lights,' and brevis lux is not 'brief candle.' If they were, the passages have no resemblance. 'To be, or not to be,' is 'taken almost verbatim from Plato.' Mr. Donnelly says that Mr. Follett says that the Messrs. Langhorne say so. But, where is the passage in Plato?

Such are the proofs by which men ignorant of the classics prove that the author of the poems attributed to Shakespeare was a classical scholar. In fact, he probably had a 'practicable' knowledge of Latin, such as a person of his ability might pick up at school, and increase by casual study: points to which we return. For the rest, classical lore had filtered into contemporary literature and translations, such as North's Plutarch.

As to modern languages, Mr. Donnelly decides that Shakespeare knew Danish, because he must have read Saxo Grammaticus 'in the original tongue'—which, of course, is NOT Danish! Saxo was done out of the Latin into French. Thus Shakespeare is not exactly proved to have been a Danish scholar. There is no difficulty in supposing that 'a clayver man,' living among wits, could pick up French and Italian sufficient for his uses. But extremely stupid people are naturally amazed by even such commonplace acquirements. When the step is made from cleverness to genius, then the dull disbelieve, or cry out of a miracle. Now, as 'miracles do not happen,' a man of Shakespeare's education could not have written the plays attributed to him by his critics, companions, friends, and acquaintances. Shakespeare, ex hypothesi, was a rude unlettered fellow. Such a man, the Baconians assume, would naturally be chosen by Bacon as his mask, and put forward as the author of Bacon's pieces. Bacon would select a notorious ignoramus as a plausible author of pieces which, by the theory, are rich in knowledge of the classics, and nobody would be surprised. Nobody would say: 'Shakespeare is as ignorant as a butcher's boy, and cannot possibly be the person who translated Hamlet's soliloquy out of Plato, "Hamlet" at large out of the Danish; who imitated the "Hellene" of Euripides, and borrowed "Troilus and Cressida" from the Greek of Dares Phrygius'—which happens not to exist. Ignorance can go no further than in these arguments. Such are the logic and learning of American amateurs, who sometimes do not even know the names of the books they talk about, or the languages in which they are written. Such learning and such logic are passed off by 'the less than half educated' on the absolutely untaught, who decline to listen to scholars.

We cannot of course furnish a complete summary of all that the Baconians have said in their myriad pages. All those pages, almost, really flow from the little volume of Mr. Smith. We are obliged to take the points which the Baconians regard as their strong cards. We have dealt with the point of classical scholarship, and shown that the American partisans of Bacon are not scholars, and have no locus standi. We shall take next in order the contention that Bacon was a poet; that his works contain parallel passages to Shakespeare, which can only be the result of common authorship; that Bacon's notes, called 'Promus,' are notes for Shakespeare's plays; that, in style, Bacon and Shakespeare are identical. Then we shall glance at Bacon's motives for writing plays by stealth, and blushing to find it fame. We shall expose the frank folly of averring that he chose as his mask a man who (some assert) could not even write; and we shall conclude by citing, once more, the irrefragable personal testimony to the genius and character of Shakespeare.

To render the Baconian theory plausible it is necessary to show that Bacon had not only the learning needed for 'the authorship of Shakespeare,' but that he gives some proof of Shakespeare's poetic qualities; that he had reasons for writing plays, and reasons for concealing his pen, and for omitting to make any claim to his own literary triumphs after Shakespeare was dead. Now, as to scholarship, the knowledge shown in the plays is not that of a scholar, does not exceed that of a man of genius equipped with what, to Ben Jonson, seemed 'small Latin and less Greek,' and with abundance of translations, and books like 'Euphues,' packed with classical lore, to help him. With the futile attempts to prove scholarship we have dealt. The legal and medical lore is in no way beyond the 'general information' which genius inevitably amasses from reading, conversation, reflection, and experience.

A writer of to-day, Mr. Kipling, is fond of showing how easily a man of his rare ability picks up the terminology of many recondite trades and professions. Again, evidence taken on oath proves that Jeanne d'Arc, a girl of seventeen, developed great military skill, especially in artillery and tactics, that she displayed political clairvoyance, and that she held her own, and more, among the subtlest and most hostile theologians. On the ordinary hypothesis, that Shakespeare was a man of genius, there is, then, nothing impossible in his knowledge, while his wildly daring anachronisms could have presented no temptation to a well-regulated scientific intellect like that of Bacon. The Baconian hypothesis rests on the incredulity with which dulness regards genius. We see the phenomenon every day when stupid people talk about people of ordinary cleverness, and 'wonder with a foolish face of praise.' As Dr. Brandes remarks, when the Archbishop of Canterbury praises Henry V. and his universal accomplishments, he says:

Which is a wonder, how his grace should glean it, Since his addiction was to courses vain, His companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow, His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports AND NEVER NOTED IN HIM ANY STUDY, Any retirement, any sequestration, From open haunts and popularity.

Yet, as the Archbishop remarks (with doubtful orthodoxy), 'miracles are ceased.'

Shakespeare in these lines describes, as only he could describe it, the world's wonder which he himself was. Or, if Bacon wrote the lines, then Bacon, unlike his advocates, was prepared to recognise the possible existence of such a thing as genius. Incredulity on this head could only arise in an age and in peoples where mediocrity is almost universal. It is a democratic form of disbelief.

For the hypothesis, as we said, it is necessary to show that Bacon possessed poetic genius. The proof cannot possibly be found in his prose works. In the prose of Mr. Ruskin there are abundant examples of what many respectable minds regard as poetic qualities. But, if the question arose, 'Was Mr. Ruskin the author of Tennyson's poems?' the answer could be settled, for once, by internal evidence. We have only to look at Mr. Ruskin's published verses. These prove that a great writer of 'poetical prose' may be at the opposite pole from a poet. In the same way, we ask, what are Bacon's acknowledged compositions in verse? Mr. Holmes is their admirer. In 1599 Bacon wrote in a letter, 'Though I profess not to be a poet, I prepared a sonnet,' to Queen Elizabeth. He PREPARED a sonnet! 'Prepared' is good. He also translated some of the Psalms into verse, a field in which success is not to be won. Mr. Holmes notes, in Psalm xc., a Shakespearean parallel. 'We spend our years as a tale that is told.' Bacon renders:

As a tale told, which sometimes men attend, And sometimes not, our life steals to an end.

In 'King John,' iii. 4, we read:—

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

Now, if we must detect a connection, Bacon might have read 'King John' in the Folio, for he versified the Psalms in 1625. But it is unnecessary to suppose a reminiscence. Again, in Psalm civ. Bacon has—

The greater navies look like walking woods.

They looked like nothing of the sort; but Bacon may have remembered Birnam Wood, either from Boece or Holinshed, or from the play itself. One thing is certain: Shakespeare did not write Bacon's Psalms or compare navies to 'walking woods'! Mr. Holmes adds: 'Many of the sonnets [of Shakespeare] show the strongest internal evidence that they were addressed [by Bacon] to the Queen, as no doubt they were.' That is, Bacon wrote sonnets to Queen Elizabeth, and permitted them to pass from hand to hand, among Shakespeare's 'private friends,' as Shakespeare's (1598). That was an odd way of paying court to Queen Elizabeth. Chalmers had already conjectured that Shakespeare (not Bacon) in the sonnets was addressing the Virgin Queen, whom he recommended to marry and leave offspring— rather late in life. Shakespeare's apparent allusions to his profession—

I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view,

and

The public means which public manners breeds,

refer, no doubt, to Bacon's versatile POLITICAL behaviour. It has hitherto been supposed that sonnet lvii. was addressed to Shakespeare's friend, a man, not to any woman. But Mr. Holmes shows that the Queen is intended. Is it not obvious?

I, MY SOVEREIGN, watch the clock for you.

Bacon clearly had an assignation with Her Majesty—so here is 'scandal about Queen Elizabeth.' Mr. Holmes pleasingly remarks that Twickenham is 'within sight of Her Majesty's Palace of White Hall.' She gave Bacon the reversion of Twickenham Park, doubtless that, from the windows of White Hall, she might watch her swain. And Bacon wrote a masque for the Queen; he skilfully varied his style in this piece from that which he used under the name of Shakespeare. With a number of other gentlemen, some named, some unnamed, Bacon once, at an uncertain date, interested himself in a masque at Gray's Inn, while he and his friends 'partly devised dumb shows and additional speeches,' in 1588.