Andrew Lang

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand the dramatist makes his ‘bold strumpet’ a paladin of courage and a perfect patriot, reconciling Burgundy to the national cause by a moving speech on ‘the great pity that was in France.’ How could a ribaulde, a leaguer-lass, a witch, a sacrificer of blood to devils, display the valour, the absolute self-sacrifice, the eloquent and tender love of native land attributed to the Pucelle of the play? Are there two authors, and is Shakespeare one of them, with his understanding of the human heart? ”

“ Hunger, bonds, and the protracted weariness of months of cross-examination produced an illness but left her intellect as keen, her courage as unabated, her humour as vivacious, her memory as minutely accurate as ever. There never was a more sane and healthy human being. We never hear that, in the moments of her strange experiences, she was ‘entranced,’ or even dissociated from the actual occurrences of the hour. She heard her voices, though not distinctly, in the uproar of the brawling court which tried her at Rouen ”

“ There was clearly no evidence for the charge of a plot to murder Louis XIV., in which Colbert, in England, seems to have believed. Even if the French Government believed that he was at once an agent of Charles II., and at the same time a would-be assassin of Louis XIV., that hardly accounts for the intense secrecy with which his valet, Eustache Dauger, was always surrounded. Did Marsilly know of the Secret Treaty, and was it from him that Arlington got his first inkling of the royal plot? If so, Marsilly would probably have exposed the mystery in Protestant interests. We are entirely baffled. ”

“ Yet there is dense obscurity as to the finding of the jury. We have seen that Appleyard, Amy’s half-brother, was at Cumnor during the inquest. Yet, in 1567, he did not know, or pretended not to know, what the verdict had been. ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ says ‘she was found murdered (as all men said) by the crowner’s inquest,’ as if the verdict was not published, but was a mere matter of rumour—‘as all men said.’ Appleyard’s behaviour need not detain us long, as he was such a shuffling knave that his statements, on either side, were just what he found expedient in varying circumstances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Long after the fall of Khartoum, rumours of the escape of Charles Gordon were current; even in our own day people are loth to believe that their hero has perished. Like Arthur he will come again, and from Arthur to James IV. of Scotland, from James IV. to the Duke of Monmouth, or the son of Louis XVI., the populace believes and hopes that its darling has not perished. ”

“ She is willing to give body and soul for France, and this, in the eyes of the dramatist, appears to be her crime. For a French girl to bear a French heart is to stamp her as the tool of devils. It is an odd theology, and not in the spirit of Shakespeare. ”

“ Let it be granted that we cannot know whether there is a God or not. Yet either there is, or there is not. It is even betting, heads or tails, croix ou pile. This being so, it is wiser to bet that there is a God. It is safer. If you lose, you are just where you were, except for the pleasures which you desert. If you win, you win everything! What you stake is finite, a little pleasure; if you win, you win infinite bliss.
So far Charles was prepared theoretically to go but he would not abandon his diversions. ”

“ There the parallel ceases, for, in all probability, Lord Robert was not art and part in Amy’s death, and, whatever Elizabeth may have done in private, she certainly did not publicly espouse Lord Robert. A Scot as patriotic as, but less chivalrous than, Sir Walter might, however, have given us a romance of Cumnor Place in which Mary would have been avenged on ‘her sister and her foe.’ He abstained, but wove a tale so full of conscious anachronisms that we must dismiss it from our minds. ”

“ The author is well aware that whosoever discusses historical mysteries pleases the public best by being quite sure, and offering a definite and certain solution. Unluckily Science forbids, and conscience is on the same side. We verily do not know how the false Pucelle arrived at her success with the family of the true Maid; we do not know, or pretend to know, who killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey; or how Amy Robsart came by her death; or why the Valet was so important a prisoner. It is only possible to restate the cases, and remove, if we may, the errors and confusions which beset the problems. ”

“ On the theory that the man at Naples was an impostor, it is odd that he should only have spoken French, that he was charged with no swindles, that he made a very poor marriage in place of aiming at a rich union; that he had, somehow, learned de la Cloche’s secret; and that, possessing a fatal secret, invaluable to a swindler and blackmailer, he was merely disgraced and set free. Louis XIV. would, at least, have held him a masked captive for the rest of his life. But he was liberated, and, after a brief excursion, returned to Naples, where he died, maintaining that he was a prince. ”

“ It is a tale creditable to Coulton’s fancy. A patrician of genius, a wit, a profligate, in fatigue and despair, closes his career with a fierce harangue, a sacrilegious jest, a debauch, and a draught of poison, leaving to Dr. Johnson a proof of ‘the spiritual world,’ and to mankind the double mystery of Junius and of the Ghost.
As to the identity of Junius, remembering the warning of Lord Beaconsfield, ‘If you wish to be a bore, take up the “Letters of Junius,”’ we shall drop that enigma; but as to the alleged suicide of Lord Lyttelton, we think we can make that seem extremely improbable. ”

“ It is true that State prisoners of very little account were kept with great secrecy. But it cannot well be argued that they were all treated with the extraordinary precautions which, in the case of Dauger, were not relaxed for twenty-five or thirty years. The King says, according to Louvois, that the safe keeping of Dauger is ‘of the last importance to his service.’ He must have intercourse with nobody. His windows must be where nobody can pass; several bolted doors must cut him off from the sound of human voices. Saint-Mars himself, the commandant, must feed the valet daily. ”

“ An ambitious lawyer passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he publishes ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the actor’s care all his sonnets to the Queen, to Gloriana, and for years these manuscript poems are handed about by Shakespeare, as his own, among the actors, hack scribblers, and gay young nobles of his acquaintance. ”

“ Monsieur told Montague that he need not beg for the life of a would-be murderer like Marsilly. But as to this idea, ‘they begin now to mince it at Court,’ and Ruvigny assured du Moulin ‘that they had no such thoughts.’ De Lyonne had seen Marsilly and observed that it was a blunder to seize him. The French Government was nervous, and Turenne’s secretary had been ‘pumping’ several ambassadors as to what they thought of Marsilly’s capture on foreign territory. One ambassador replied with spirit that a crusade by all Europe against France, as of old against the Moslems, would be necessary. ”

“ She believed the death to be ‘a very accident.’ She had heard Amy ‘divers times pray to God to deliver her from desperation,’ but entirely disbelieved in suicide, which no one would attempt, perhaps, by falling down two flights of stairs. ”

“ We must accept all of Mr. Wynell’s statement or none; we cannot accept, like Mr. Pollock, only Godfrey’s confession of owning a dangerous secret, without Godfrey’s explanation of the nature of the danger. Against THAT danger (his knowing and taking no action upon what Oates had deposed) Godfrey’s ‘security’ was Oates’s other deposition, that his information was already in the Minister’s hands, and that he had come to Godfrey by the Minister’s orders. The invidiousness of knowing and not acting on Oates’s ‘dangerous secret,’ Godfrey hoped, fell on the Minister rather than on himself. ”

“ Many Catholics, as yet unauthorised, I conceive, by the Church, accept the theory of Jeanne herself; her saints were true saints from Paradise. On the other hand it is manifest that visions of a bright light and ‘auditions’ of voices are common enough phenomena in madness, and in the experiences of very uninspired sane men and women. From the sensations of these people Jeanne’s phenomena are only differentiated by their number, by their persistence through seven years of an almost abnormally healthy life, by their importance, orderliness, and veracity, as well as by their heroic character. ”

“ On the other hand is the monstrous will. Unworldly as de la Cloche may have been, he can hardly have fancied that Wales was the appanage of a bastard of the Crown; and he certainly knew that ‘the province of Monmouth’ already gave a title to his younger brother, the duke, born in 1649. Yet the testator claims Wales or Monmouth for his unborn child. Again, de la Cloche may not have known who his mother was. But not only can no Mary, or Mary Henrietta, of the Lennox family be found, except the impossible Lady Mary who was younger than de la Cloche ”

“ 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. ”

“ For suicide, being a man of melancholic temperament, he had reasons as many and as good as mortal could desire. That he was murdered for not being active enough in prosecuting the plot, is most improbable. That he was taken off by Danby’s orders, for giving Coleman and the Duke of York early warning, is an absurd idea, for Danby could have had him on THAT score by ordinary process of law. That he was slain by Oates’s gang, merely to clinch the fact that a plot there veritably was, is improbable. At the same time, Godfrey had been calling Oates a perjurer: he KNEW that Oates was forsworn. ”

“ The secret of the Man in the Iron Mask, or at least of one of the two persons who have claims to be the Mask, was ‘WHAT HAD EUSTACHE DAUGER DONE?’ To guard this secret the most extraordinary precautions were taken, as we have shown in the fore-going essay. And yet, if secret there was, it might have got wind in the simplest fashion. In the ‘Vicomte de Bragelonne,’ Dumas describes the tryst of the Secret-hunters with the dying Chief of the Jesuits at the inn in Fontainebleau. They come from many quarters, there is a Baron of Germany and a laird from Scotland, but Aramis takes the prize. ”

“ Pollock’s theory reposes on the belief, rejected by L’Estrange, that the Jesuits ‘were the damnedest fools.’ Suppose them guilty. The first step of a Jesuit, or of any gentleman, about to commit a deliberate deeply planned murder, is to secure an alibi. Le Fevre did not, or, when questioned (on Mr. Pollock’s theory) by Bedloe, he would have put him off with his alibi. Again, ‘a Jesuit,’ ‘the Queen’s confessor,’ does not do his murders in the Queen’s house: no gentleman does. But, if Le Fevre did commit this solecism, he would have told Bedloe a different story ”

“ The man at Naples was regarded as a gentleman, but that is not so important in an age when the low scoundrel, Bedloe, could pass in Spain and elsewhere for an English peer.
But again, if the Naples man is a swindler, as already remarked, he behaves unlike one. A swindler would have tried to entrap a woman of property into a marriage—he might have seduced, but would not have married, the penniless Teresa Corona, giving what money he had to her father. ”

“ Such was the evidence to show that Dugdale spoke of Godfrey’s death, in the country, two or three days before Godfrey’s body was found. The fact can scarcely be said to be PROVED, considering the excitement of men’s minds, the fallacies of memory, the silence of Dugdale at his first examination before the Council, Sanbidge’s refusal to corroborate Chetwyn, and Wilson’s inability to remember anything about a matter so remarkable and so recent. To deny, like Sanbidge, to be unable to remember, like Wilson, demanded some courage, in face of the frenzied terror of the Protestants. ”

“ Walpole speaks of a DREAM, but he soon has other, if not better, information. Writing to Mason on December 11, he says that ghost stories from the north will now be welcome. ‘Lord Lyttelton’s vision has revived the taste; though it seems a little odd that an APPARITION should despair of getting access to his Lordship’s bed, in the shape of a young woman, without being forced to use the disguise of a robin-redbreast.’ What was an apprehension or prophecy has become a dream, and the dream has become an apparition of a robin-redbreast and a young woman. ”

“ So, in early years, the author of the plays (Bacon, by the theory) had to work over old pieces. All this is the work of the hack of a playing company; it is not work to which a man in Bacon’s position could stoop. Why should he? What had he to gain by patching and vamping? Certainly not money, if the wealth of Shakespeare is a dark mystery to the Baconian theorists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To myself it seems not improbable that the King and Louvois were but stupidly and cruelly nervous about what Dauger MIGHT know. Saint-Mars, when he proposed to utilise Dauger as a prison valet, manifestly did not share the trembling anxieties of Louis XIV. and his Minister; anxieties which grew more keen as time went on. However, ‘a soldier only has his orders,’ and Saint-Mars executed his orders with minute precision, taking such unheard-of precautions that, in legend, the valet blossomed into the rightful king of France. ”