disappearances whereof the mystery has remained
unsolved.

The editor of the People, then virtually
a branch of the Globe, occupied, as I have
already lamented, the pleasant room of pleasant
memories in the Globe's old premises in the
Strand immediately opposite the new. This
was Dr. Sebastian Evans, concerning whom,
when I made his acquaintance later, I wondered,
and I wonder still, how that paper, of all
papers, came to be edited by him, of all men.
That a Sunday paper for the million requires,
especially during its infancy, an editor of more
than ordinary ability, need not be said. But
it certainly does not require an extraordinarily
accomplished scholar in many literatures ; a fine
poet of a high order ; a skilled artist in colour and
line ; a learned antiquary who is more than merely
learned : and Sebastian Evans was all these.
Nor can I imagine a man who was all these as
feeling at home in the editorial chair of a Sunday
paper for the millions, who cannot reasonably be
expected to take the smallest fraction of interest
in Geoffrey of Monmouth, or St. Francis of Assisi,
or the legend of the Holy Grail. The People
has proved itself an excellently squared hole ;
but its first editor was assuredly a peg only too
super-excellently round, He did not retain what

^63



Mid- Victorian Memories

must have been an uncongenial post much longer
than was to be looked for ; and the squarest of
pegs was subsequently found in Carlisle, who,
however, did not quit his table at the Globe.
Others whom I remember as passing through
our or a neighbouring room on their road to
distinction belong to a later date than the title
of this volume covers — E. V. Lucas, C. L.
Graves, and Arthur Morrison, novelist and
playwright, whose "Tales of Mean Streets"
were the opening of a new field of social ex-
ploration.

The Globe, to which I had looked to serve me
as a time-winner for fiction, inevitably came to
absorb me in its service. The series of annuals
for the Gentleman s, it is true, continued for
six years longer, till it came to an end with "A
Christmas Rose" in 1888 — its fifteenth con-
secutive year ; but those six years, and six more,
resulted in but one fijU-blown novel and hitherto
my last — " King or Knave?" first issued serially
in the People. I did, however, under the title
of " Gods and Heroes," produce one other work
of fiction ; though I certainly cannot boast of
the fiction as my own, seeing that it consisted
of the stories of classical mythology merely re-
told. As may well be supposed, twelve years
of daily routine were not fertile in incidents that
264



The Marvin Case

call for publication — among which I do not
include private and personal sorrows ; such are,
or ought to be, secret and sacred things. The
hot water into which the Globe, with such
amazing indiscretion, let itself tumble in what
may be called the Marvin case had cooled down
before my return ; but it was recent enough to
be still a subject of office talk and speculation.
Marvin, it will be remembered, had been em-
ployed by the Foreign Office, at the regular
rate of tenpence an hour for outside temporary
work, to copy the draft of a secret agreement
between the British and Russian Governments
preliminary to the Congress of Berlin. How
so confidential a task, in a matter of which it
was of the utmost importance to keep the British
public in ignorance, came to be entrusted to
outside and virtually irresponsible hands, is
beyond guessing. The result was that the
Globe came out with a publication, not merely
of the terms of the document, which could have
been explained away, but of the document itself,
word for word. The utterly incredible account
of the matter was that Marvin, with no more
than the necessary allowance of time for his
copy, and without the minutest opportunity for
note or memorandum, had carried the whole long
diplomatic document so accurately away in his

265



Mid- Victorian Memories

head as to be able to sell it to the Press for
reproduction without the omission or alteration
of a single word. Such a feat of memory, if not
absolutely impossible — few things are — is so ob-
viously and grossly improbable as not practically
to be distinguished from impossibility. Such,
however, was Marvin's own story ; and, un-
satisfactory as that solution of the mystery was,
no member of the staff of the Globe when the
incident happened seemed able to suggest a
better. Might it not be that the Russian Em-
bassy could have thrown some light into the
darkness had it pleased ? It might have been
held politic to embarrass the British Government
by premature publication of the agreement, which
of course would be in duplicate. Marvin, too,
had closer connection with Russia, where he had
resided, than was usual among journalists of that
time, or than the officials of our Foreign Office
were presumably aware. These surmises are not
supported by a particle of knowledge. But, all
the same, a diplomatic stratagem is less unpre-
cedented and more likely than a feat of memory
so marvellous as to savour of miracle.

As I have forewarned the reader of this
chapter, the chronicle of such few incidents of
the Globe office as remain in my recollection
is distinctly of the flavour of small beer, One
266



A Fog and a Fire

of them is finding myself one morning the sole
member of the editorial staff that a dense fog,
of the sort that once upon a time made London
famous beyond all other cities, had permitted to
arrive. That the paper did not miss its accus-
tomed midday trains is not so miraculous as
Marvin's alleged memory ; but neither is it very
far behind. Another morning I arrived at the
office to find that it had been completely gutted
by fire. During the long process of rebuilding
and refurnishing the entire staff had to work at
a single table, without over-much elbow-room,
at the office of the People, then lately transferred
from the Strand to Milford Lane ; and it was
anything but a joy to have to produce, against
time, a leader on a subject seldom or never
settled till a minute or so before it had to be
started, with one's close neighbour on the right,
perhaps, evolving wit for " By the Way," and the
one on the left busy with the minutiae of ecclesias-
tical affairs, in a general buzz of consultation, and
liable, in the throes of some stubborn sentence,
to be asked some sudden question. My third
incident is memorable, at least to myself, because
it gave me the only impression I have of George
Augustus Sala apart from after-dinner eloquence :
I wish it had been other than of Sala in a rage.
The Yorkshire Post was defendant in an action

267



Mid- Victorian Memories

that turned upon a point of journalistic custom.
The editor of that paper, with whom I had some
slight acquaintance, called upon me in London,
and, without any explanation of his purpose., got
from me, in the course of a craftily casual con-
versation, a favourable opinion. The result was
a subpoena to give expert evidence of custom at
the Leeds Assizes ; and when I reached the
court I found myself in company with Sala and
Joseph Cowen — the Joseph Cowen of Newcastle-
upon-Tyne — who had both been brought to
Leeds for the same purpose and in the same
way. We attended a conference with Waddy,
Q.C., who was to lead for the Post. Cowen
was amiable over the matter, and repeated the
evidence he was prepared to give in his soft
Northumbrian burr. But Sala was furious. He
had been dragged all the way from London to
Leeds, at his extreme inconvenience, against his
will. He knew nothing about journalistic custom
nor cared ; and if he went into the box he should
say so. So let them put him into the box — it
would be the worse for them ! He had been
tricked out of an opinion — " But that's Yorkshire
all over ! " he fired off, as he stormed away to
catch the next train to town.

The plaintiff's case broke down on some point
of legal practice before any witness, except the
268



Expert Witnesses

plaintiff himself, was called. I know what has
been said of expert witnesses. But, judging
from what I received on that solitary occasion,
for fee and expenses, all for a trip to Leeds with
nothing to do when I was there, I should not
object to a subpoena in that capacity as often as
some plaintiff or defendant pleased, Yorkshire
or no.



269



CHAPTER XIX

The White Rose of Wynnstay— Order of the White Rose
— The prohibited Mass— The Stuart Exhibition— Whistler
a Jacobite— Charles Augustus Howell— The Sobieski
Stuarts— Rise and spread of interest in the House of
Stuart — Helps to history

In the year 1710, some gentlemen of Cheshire
and Denbighshire, representing the principal
county families within seven miles of Wrexham,
formed themselves into a professedly convivial
and unprofessedly political society which they
called the Cycle of the White Rose — " Cycle,"
or circle, because its meetings were to be held,
every three weeks, at the houses of its members
in rotation: "of the White Rose," because that
flower was the traditional emblem of adherence
to the strict rule of Royal descent as held to
be of divine sanction. The badge of the House
of York had now become that of loyalty to the
cause represented by him whom some called
the Old Pretender, others the Chevalier de St.
George, others King James the Third. In
course of time the meetings came, for con-
270



The White Rose of Wynnstay

venience' sake, to be always held at Wynnstay,
where, under each successive Sir Watkin Wil-
liams Wynn as its hereditary " patron," the
Cycle itself became, in fact, the Jacobite Council
of North Wales. But the remarkable feature of
its history is that this essentially Jacobite society
continued its meetings at Wynnstay without a
break till between 1850 and i860 — a continuity
of over a hundred and forty years : nor was it
till nearly so late as 1890 that its last surviving
member died. Moreover, there is good evidence
that its Jacobitism was a reality long after the
failure of the 'forty-five. How long, it is impos-
sible to say ; but no doubt the supremacy of its
convivial over its political character would be
gradual and slow. Jacobitism lingered in England
as a principle, indeed as a potential force, much
longer than ordinary histories tell. Did not
Dr. Johnson, speaking when George III. had
been on the throne for nearly twenty years,
declare that " If England were fairly polled,
the present King would be sent away to-night,
and his adherents hanged to-morrow".'* " If a
mere vote could do it," he went on to assert,
" there would be twenty to one." And his Whig
opponent had to admit that a poll of the people
of England on the question of Right would be
in favour of the House of Stuart, though putting

271



Mid- Victorian Memories

the majority at twenty to one might be going
too far.

While the last member of the Cycle who had
attended a meeting at Wynnstay was still living,
provision had been made for the continuity of
its tradition. In the light of recent research,
conventional history was already falling into
some discredit ; and especially was this the case,
as concerned this country, with the period from
the accession of Charles I. to that of George III.
Popular history is pretty certain to be written in
the interest of the winning side, ignoring incon-
venient truths and stereotyping convenient errors.
Not that this necessarily implies any conscious
dishonesty. One so-called historian used to take
for granted what he had learned from another,
and never thought of testing it by original in-
vestigation. The worse than merely careless
omissions and misstatements of Macaulay, and
the gross ignorance displayed by Thackeray in
his portraiture of the young Prince in " Esmond,"
are but extreme examples of how history used
to be written. How it ouorht to be written is
better understood than it was thirty or forty
years ago, now that all extant documents of the
past requisite for research — state papers, records,
and correspondence both official and private,
formerly buried away, forgotten, or unknown to
272



Historical Study

exist — have been collected, arranged, and ren-
dered accessible : the historian has to be accurate
at his peril, for as surely as he commits a blunder,
with or without intention, so surely will it sooner
or later be spotted. A very short course of
documentary study sufficed to show that the
so-called history of Great Britain from 1625 to
1760 mainly consisted of the white-washing of
success and the black-washing of failure. The
history of a nation's past is, or should be, the
foundation of its future : to base that future upon
false history is to incur the doom of the man who
built his house upon the sand. Moreover, justice
demanded that the men who suffered for losing
causes should not be condemned off-hand on the
unquestioned authority of those at whose hands
they suffered. To let the most leading case
stand for all — King James II. may have been
a bigoted and cruel tyrant, and his adherents
knaves or slaves or tools or fools. William of
Orange may have been a pattern Christian hero.
The Revolution may have been the pure and
spontaneous exercise of a patriotic people's
sovereign will. Such had for generations been
the all but universally accepted historic creed.
" All but " — for there were already some not
unintelligent persons who could not allow that
•'may have been" logically amounts to was.
T 273



Mid- Victorian Memories

They asked, How would history have been
written had the Dutch invasion never taken
place, and had a James the Second kept his
crown, and been succeeded by a James the Third ?
Probably it would have been untrustworthy, as
representing nothing but success ; and for just
that very reason, the history of success must be
held untrustworthy as it stands. To get at the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth, the history of the Great Rebellion and
the Revolution of 1688, with their intervening
and immediately succeeding chapters, must, they
maintained, be revised : appeal being meanwhile
made to the court of an educated public opinion
from the misdirections of partial or ill-informed
judges. No doubt in many, perhaps in most,
cases a belief in the divine sanction of sovereignty
had much to do with the demand, united with a
previous conviction that from the open truth of
facts their belief would have everything to gain
and nothing to lose.

This is a volume of memories, not of opinions ;
but in this matter the former cannot be intelligibly
reported without some assistance from the latter.
The opinions that I have thus and therefore
stated represent very much what had become
my own attitude towards political history and
historical politics before I discovered that they
274



The Prohibited Mass

were shared by others, few, of course, but
numerous enough to have reorganised the Cycle
of the White Rose on Hnes better adapted to
later times. My discovery was made profes-
sionally, through having in hand, for the Globe,
an incident personally attractive to myself by
historic sympathy. Now well-nigh forgotten, it
made a considerable stir then, and, though it
would be held of no significance or importance,
it "caught on." In January, 1888, the late Earl
of Ashburnham, in a letter to the press, drew
public attention to the 31st of that month as
"the hundredth anniversary of the death of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart, called by some the Young
Pretender, and by others King Charles the Third,"
and this reminder was followed by the announce-
ment of a solemn Mass to be celebrated at the
Carmelite Church in Kensington for the repose
of the Prince's soul. So unprecedented a project
promised to be of public interest, as proved to
be the case, especially when the Mass, for some
unimaginable reason, was prohibited by Cardinal
Manning. Certainly Manning was a Whig ; but
it is of course unthinkable that a prelate of his
Church refused its rites and its prayers to any soul
of its communion by reason of partisan prejudice;
while timidity, even had there been occasion for
it, was the last weakness with which he could be

275



Mid- Victorian Memories

charged. The Order of the White Rose had no
corporate connection with the matter. But it
contained at least two or three members of the
Cardinal's flock ; and from one of these, who had
taken a prominent part in the announcement of
the Requiem, I first learned of the existence of a
Society based on the principles that "All Authority
has a divine sanction, and that the Sovereign
power does not exist merely by the will of the
People or the consent of the governed," and that
" The murder of King Charles the First, and the
Revolution of 1688, were national crimes."

There is no advertisement like prohibition, as
Manning, had he been a novelist, a playwright,
or anybody else subject to censorship, would have
known. A revival of Jacobitism got talked about.
It is true that the notions of the man in the street
concerning the meaning of the term were apt to
be foggy. I have known several cases of con-
fusion of ]3.codi^e with Jsicodin ; and Greenwood's
paper, the Anti-Jacobin, was taken by some for a
counterblast to the pretensions of the White Rose.
I once met an ordinarily well-informed person
who took for granted that a Jacobite was a follower
of a then somewhat prominent politician of the
name of Jacoby ! On the other hand was a
revelation of a hitherto unsuspected amount of
Jacobite principle or sympathy throughout the
276



The Stuart Exhibition

country. The Order of the White Rose, having'
emerged, or rather been drawn, from a modest
privacy into an outer and wider world, received
appHcations for membership from numbers of
persons who had hitherto imagined himself or
herself to be the last and solitary survivor of an
unsuccessful cause. And if the Order, thus
vitalised, had done nothing else for the revision
of history, no better service in the ever-needful
crusade against popular ignorance and consequent
injustice was ever rendered than by its conception
and inception of the Stuart Exhibition that opened
at the close of 1889 : at any rate, according to the
view that politics, without constant reference to
the still unsettled controversies of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, are a mere muddle. Its
" Patron " was Queen Victoria, who took the
keenest pride and interest in the history of her
own Royal House of Stuart : for hers it was, no
less than its lineal heir's, and it was owing to its
being hers that she reigned, though few, except
herself, seemed to realise that elementary item of
dynastic history. Nor did she object to the
catalogue's designation of the three last Princes
of its name as James III. and VIII., Charles III.,
and Henry IX. No doubt the warm personal
interest she took in the enterprise, as patron,
exhibitor, and visitor, helped it into unexpected

277



Mid- Victorian Memories

fashion. That it did " catch on," and to good
purpose, is shown by the best of all tests ap-
plicable to such experiments — the commercial :
the three months during which it remained open
resulted in a clear profit of over ^^2,000 from
admissions, after all expenses had been paid.
" Stuarts is hup now ! " was the explanation of
a dealer in old prints to a would-be customer
who considered the price asked for one of his
wares in that line inordinately high.

The amount of Jacobitism in the air naturally
suggested representation in the Press ; and on
the anniversary of CuUoden, 1890, appeared the
first number of the Royalist, in the form of a
small monthly magazine of thirty-two pages,
established as the authorised organ of the Order
of the White Rose. Its circulation was neces-
sarily limited. But it sufficed for a continuous life
of thirteen years, throughout all of which — with
the exception of the fifth — I edited it as a labour
of love, until the love, without lessening, became
no longer able to carry on the labour. In the
following year our maintenance of the insepara-
bility of past history from present politics was
illustrated with unusual directness by Gladstone's
introduction of a Bill for removing the remaining
religious disabilities, with the exception of those
attaching to the Royal Family, supplemented by
278



An Irving Revival



Sir John Pope Hennessy's notice of motion
" That it be an instruction to the Committee
that they have power to insert a clause re-
Heving the Sovereign and the members of
the Royal Family from all religious disabili-
ties." A more sentimental, but not there-
fore less effective, fillip was given in 1891
to the current interest in the Stuarts and their
Cause by Henry Irving, who judged the state
of the atmosphere suitable for a successful
revival — and he judged rightly — of W. G. Wills's
" King Charles the First." In connection with
this, I possess an illustration of how history can
be written, and in what extreme need it some-
times stands of being revised. This is a cutting
from a leading daily paper, which tells how the
first-night audience comprised the members of
the Order of the White Rose wearing their
"insignia," and gives the names of Mr. and
Mrs. R. E. Francillon as among them. Now,
as a matter of fact, no member of the Order, so
far as I am aware, was present on the occasion ;
if any was, he certainly did not wear his badge
in public ; and for my wife and myself I could
prove an unanswerable alibi — she was at Chelten-
ham, and I at Berwick-upon-Tweed.

For that matter, no newspaper, by some queer
fatality, seems capable of complete accuracy in

279



Mid- Victorian Memories

any reference to the White Rose. Most sweep-
ing assertions have to be qualified by exceptions ;
but this is a rule without any exception that I
have ever met with, or of which I have ever
heard. Otherwise accurate obituary notices of the
late Lord Ashburnham stated that he was President
of the Order of the White Rose. But the Order
has no such official as President : and he was never
even one of its members, though of course, as
the representative of Don Carlos in this country,
he was in general sympathy with its legitimist
principles, and attended, as a guest, at least one
of its sessions. It does not follow that every-
body who accepts some or even all of its tenets
is or ever was on the roll of its Companions.
There has never been the slightest secrecy about
either its principles, its purposes, or its proceed-
ings. At its discussions and its dinners— for is
not the Order heir to the traditions of the White
Rose of Wynnstay ? and did not the White Rose
of Wynnstay most diligently dine ? — the guests
not seldom outnumbered the members. My pre-
vious remembrance of the many-sidedness of
Dr. Sebastian Evans in connection with the
People here runs on to one of these occasions,
when he returned thanks for the toast of the
Guests, with whom his name had been joined.
The Royalist, too, had much to thank him for.
280



whistler a Jacobite

There were many with us, though not of us.
The only time that I met Andrew Lang was
when I happened to sit next him at a dinner of
the Fishmongers' Company ; but that single
happening enables me to report his interest in the
history of the House of Stuart as by no means so
purely non-political as his writings taken alone
might lead one to suppose.

But there was one not merely with but dis-
tinctly of us whose membership of the Order will,
I venture to say, defy the guessing of my most
ingenious outside reader. When I first saw the
roll of its Companions, great was my surprise to
see, high up thereon, the indubitable signature
of James MacNeill Whistler, with the appended
butterfly, to the declaration " I affirm the prin-
ciples of the Order of the White Rose." Not
only so, but I presently met my co-Decemvir
at one of the Sessions of the Order, and sub-
sequently at others. He had joined the Order
two years before my discovery of its existence.
That Whistler held legitimist opinions will sur-
prise most people : that he held them so strongly
and definitely as to enter a definitely legitimist
society will surprise them more : that so interest-
ing because so uncharacteristic an aspect of him
should have escaped the notice of even the most
intimate of his biographers, is more surprising

281



Mid- Victorian Memories

still. Collectors of artistic curiosities are aware of
the contributions from his pencil that have given
a special value to sets of that eccentrically able
periodical, the Jacobite Whirlwind, started by-