CHAPTER IX.

CROMWELL'S CONTEMPORARIES: PRINCE RUPERT.

PRINCE RUPERT has often been called the

evil genius of Charles, but it would perhaps be quite as true, if not more so, to designate Charles as the evil genius of Rupert. There is, no doubt, a not unnatural prejudice against the prince, as a foreigner, commanding the royal army against the arms of the Parliament and the people; and his name has something of a mythical character attaching to it; he springs suddenly upon us and upon our nation as something even like a wild hunter. Our readers ought to make themselves distinctly acquainted with this singular person, who seems to hold much the same place-however inferior in capacity and command-in the royal armies which Cromwell held in that of the Parliament. Who was this Prince Rupert? Our readers will perhaps remember the magnificent festivities which gladdened the Court and the nation when, in 1613, the marriage of Elizabeth of England, the daughter of James I., was solemnized, in her sixteenth year, with the Prince Palatine, the Elector of Bohemia. If we may judge from contemporaneous chronicles, the beauty of this only

surviving sister of Charles was singular; she was called the "Pearl of Britain," and the "Queen of Hearts;" while the charming symmetry of her form and features are said to have been enhanced by the exquisite play of soft expression over her face. It has been said that history borrows the colours of romance when she paints this fair young princess on the morning of her marriage, as she passed along to the chapel over a gallery raised for the purpose, glowing in all the lights of loveliness and majesty, arrayed in white, her rich dark hair falling over her shoulders, and on her head a crown of pure gold; one hand locked in that of her brother Charles, and the other leaning on the arm of the old Earl of Northampton; her train of noble bridesmaids followed on her steps. It is said that England had never seen the equal to the sumptuous splendour of this marriage; the bravery and riches were incomparable, the gold, the silver, the pearls, the diamonds and every variety of jewels. The king's, queen's, and prince's jewels were valued alone at £900,000 sterling. Then came magnificent masques, and the mock fight upon the Thames; and then some gay masque representing the marriage of the Thames and the Rhine; and at night fireworks blazing over London. For the marriage was very popular, and was supposed to be a good omen for the cause of Protestantism. And when the fair princess reached the country of her adoption, the same romantic and festive lights for some time shone round her; the grand old ruins of

Heidelberg still retain the memories of her residence there, and romantic fiction has sought to charm the old walls and rooms of the famous ruin with her

presence.

She was the mother of Prince Rupert. He was born at Prague, in 1619; his father had claimed to be, and had got himself and his fair young queen crowned, king and queen of Bohemia, so that the prince was born with all the assumptions of royalty around him. But his genealogist says, "He began to be illustrious many years before his birth, and we must look back into history, above two thousand years, to discover the first rays of his glory. We may consider," continues the writer, "him very great, being descended from the two most illustrious and ancient houses of Europe, that of England and Palatine of the Rhine." And then the writer goes on to trace up his ancestry to Atilla, Charlemagne, and so down through a succession of Ruperts, Louis, Fredericks. The facts after the birth of Rupert are an affecting satire upon all this. All the festive chambers became but the rooms in a house of mourning; the poor Queen Elizabeth shortly became a widow, an exile from the land of her birth, an outcast from the country of her adoption and ambition; all the dark destinies of the Stuarts were realized in her story. When Rupert reached manhood, she appears to have been a pensioner on Holland; her brother Charles had attained to the English crown, his troubles had not yet commenced,

so as to prevent him from giving some help to his sister; but he appears to have given none, and only invited her to England with so much indifference that the cold hospitality was refused.

Rupert was in the army of the Netherlands, attaining some little experience in war; but on the whole passing in those young days a restless and purposeless life. Then he became an Austrian prisoner in the grim old castle of Lintz, and a long time passed on in obscurity and silence, illuminated, however, by a pleasing, apparently innocent and romantic love story. The Count Kuffstein, the governor of Lintz, had a daughter, an only daughter; and the old governor, his stern imagination somewhat touched by the misfortunes of his royal prisoner, charged his daughter to care for him, watch over him, and minister some comfort to him—to do which, perhaps, the young lady was not indisposed. So, however, went on some love passages in the dark rooms of the old castle hanging over the rolling Danube, passages which the prince seems not to have forgotten through the future years and vicissitudes of his strange career. At length the time of his release came, apparently chiefly through the pathetic interest of his mother. Then the storm rose in England, and Rupert accepted in good time an invitation from his Uncle Charles.

He reached England at the time when the queen, Henrietta Maria, was meditating her flight, and he attended her to Holland, and thence, returning again, he joined the poor little Court of his uncle in the old