THE FAMILY OF LA TREMOILLE*
FEW of the great old Houses of Europe can surpass in historical interest that of La Tremoille. Its archives, first carefully collected in the sixteenth century, stored honour- ably, in the seventeenth, in the strong-room of the magnificent Chfiteau de Thouars—now a prison, which was built by Henry, Due de La Tremoille, and his wife, Turenne's sister. Marie de La Tour d'Auvergne—partly destroyed in the Revolution, remain a mine of treasure, a chronicle of the characters, the deeds, the correspondence, of a family which has kept its dis- tinguished place in French history from the Crusades down- wards. Portions of these archives have been from time to time published, especially in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, in the latter by the late Duo de La Tremoille, of the French Academy ; but it would appear that Miss Winifred Stephens has bad the advantage of studying them as a whole. In any case, she shows an easy familiarity with her subject, and never loses her way among its many branches. For the story of the La Tremoille family is far from uniform or straightforward. Their alliances included the House of Arragon, reigning in Naples, the Houses of Nassau, Hesse- Cassel, Saxe-Weimar, dec. They were related to the Royal Family of France through Bourbons and Condes. The marriage of Francois de La Tremoille in 1511 with Anne de Laval, granddaughter of Frederic King of Naples, was the origin of a claim to the crown of Naples, only dropped at the end of the eighteenth century. In virtue of this claim, the title of Prince de Tarente was assumed by the La Tremoille family. Everybody will remember Mme. de Sevigne's good Protestant friend and neighbour " la bonne Tarente," born a • Prom the Crusades to the Freaeh Resolution s Ristory qf55. Is Tamale Amity. By Winifred Stephens. London: Constable and Co. Oda. dd. net.]
Princess of Hesse-Cassel, the wife of Charles de La Tainoille, who as Prince de Tarente distinguished himself in the Thirty Years' War.
Crusaders, feudal tyrants, great condottieri, rich and powerful nobles reigning in Brittany and Poitou, with vassals to be counted by thousands, Counts, Dukes, Princes, the La Tremoille family increased in power and splendour till the middle of the seventeenth century. Then the work of Richelieu, whose object was to weaken the great nobles by turning them into courtiers, and extinguishing their more local glories in that of the Roi Soleil, began to tell in earnest. Half ruined by the struggle of the Fronde and then by the enormous expenses of Court life, deserting their chilteaux, leaving their estates to he taxed and oppressed by intendants for the profit of an absent lord in whom the people of the provinces could take none of the old personal interest, the La Tremoilles, and many like them, entered on the direct road —made by the great Cardinal all unknowingly—which led OP to the Revolution.
Perhaps the moat interesting period in the family history is that which saw two generations of La Tremoilles set apart by their Protestantism from the general traditions of the French nobility. The vices of the Valois Court, the strong appeal made by "the religion," so popular in Poitou, to the earnest nature of Duke Claude, his friendship with Conde, shortly to be his brother-in-law, his personal power, wealth, and influence, placed him in the front rank of the Huguenot leaders. His marriage with Charlotte Brabantine of Nassau, the daughter of William the Silent by his third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier, connected him still more closely with the cause and with its most distinguished French adherents. His Protestantism was not shaken by the personal enmity of Henry IV., whom he considered "a sceptical time-server," nor by the accusations of im- morality and murder, probably false, which blighted the life of his sister Charlotte, Princesse de Condd, at one time an even more ardent Protestant than himself ; nor, after her acquittal, by her return to the Roman Church; a politio act in the interest of her young son, then supposed to be heir to the crown of France. Not long after this renunciation, which Duke Claude never forgave, had been proved useless by the birth of a son to Henry IV., the Duke died in the flower of his age, leaving a solemn curse to any of his children who in future years should forsake the Reformed faith. His family was not an exception to the rule of reaction which so often affects those brought up in a sternly religious atmosphere. His widow did her best. She married her eldest son into the great Huguenot family of La Tour d'Auvergne, and watched over all her children with Calvinistic strictness. But Duke Henry sacrificed his religion and a large part of his estates to the commanding influence of Cardinal de Richelieu, and his younger brother, the Comte de Laval, developed from a charming boy into a wild and vicious man, the disgrace of his family.
One of Duke Clande'a children was worthy not only of him, but of her more famous grandfather. English history, as well as romance, may lay claim to Charlotte de La Tremoillc, Countess of Derby. Readers of Sir Walter Scott can never forget his picture of this great lady in her stately old age, though the Rev. Dr. Dryasdust's indignant protest may find some echo in their minds : "Here you have a Countess of Derby fetched out of her cold grave, and saddled with a set of adventures dated twenty years after her death, besides being given up as a Catholic, when she was, in fact, a zealous Huguenot." Fak be it from us to dispute the rights of fiction, especially in the hands of the greatest of story-tellers; but it is obvious that the second point of this indictment is worse than the first. One of the strongest features in Lady Derby's strong and loyal character was her steady Protestantism. After her marriage she conformed, of course, to the Church of England, and shared her husband's faithfulness to "Church and King." She would have died, as he did, for that cause. But her own times saw nothing in this that was not consistent with the traditions of her birth and bringing-up. The Stanleys were among the few great families into which the Duchesse de La Tremont° would have consented to marry one of her children; and throughout her stormy life Charlotte de La Tremoille proved herself as much a descendant of William the Silent as of Guy the Crueader or of Louis, the "chevalier sans reproche" of Italian wars. Her letters are preserved in thb
La Tremoille archives, and English historians know how to value them, for the Civil Wars had few more heroic figures than the Lady of Lathom.
Another famous woman in the La Tremoille family, more clever than great, but also with a well-justified claim to a place in history, was Marie-Anne de La Tremoille, first Princesse de Chalaia, then, by her marriage with the head of the House of Orsini, Duchess of Braccdano, and known to Europe, after her second husband's death and the purchase of his chief title and estates by an Odescalchi, as Princesse des Trains. She belonged to a younger branch of La Tremoilles, that of Noirmoustier, descended from a younger son of the grandfather of Duke Claude. A contemporary and friend of Mme. de Maintenon, ambitious like her, but in a bolder fashion, Mme. des Ursins was one of the first diplomatists of the seventeenth century. Her hand pulled the strings which guided Charles H. of Spain to make the famous will leaving his crown to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. It was she who arranged the marriage between the young King of Spain and Marie Louise of Savoy, whose Camarera Mayor she became by French influence. For years, through the powerful favour of Louis XIV., she practically governed Spain, and in the war with England and Austria she proved herself by courage, strength, and firmness a worthy La Tremoille. There was a time when no woman in Europe held a higher political place than Mme. des Ursine. If her ambition overleaped itself and fell on the other side, such a fate was not undeserved. Saint-Simon had his reasons for suggesting that the weak health of Mine. de Maintenon, her constant ally, inspired the Princess with the idea of succeeding her as wife of Louis XIV., who had always highly admired her. And she would have been Queen of France, for no less position would have satisfied a woman of her blood and talents. But Mme. de Maintenon survived Louis XIV. It seems even more certain that after the greatest blow that ever fell upon her—the death of the Queen of Spain—Mme. des Ursine seriously planned for herself a marriage with the young King. Louis XTV.'s strong opposition making this Impossible, she rushed into the mistake of her life, and married Philip V. to Elizabeth Farneae, of whom Frederick the Great said "that she possessed all the pride of a Spartan, the obstinacy of an Englishwoman, the vivacity of a French- woman, and the craft of an Italian." Such a Princess was not likely to be ruled by her lady-in-waiting, even if a La Tremoille. She drove the old woman out of Spain, in wintry weather, with the cruelty of a Red Indian; and so ended a sovereignty which had lasted fourteen years.
It says much for Miss Stephens'a agreeable style and power of condensation that in not much more than three hundred pages she has made to march before us so many striking figures in whom the attributes of one great family show themselves over and over again. Such a history might be mush longer without losing in interest, and a review can only touch on two or three of its central characters, while quite leaving out the marvellous tales of war and romance that belong to early centuries, as well as the more modern and familiar, if melancholy, stories of eighteenth-century decline, of revolution, emigration, La Vendee, of deaths and losses, through which, however, the old race kept its vitality unimpaired.
It would have been worth while to give a full La Tremoille pedigree instead of the fragments of genealogy to be found in the notes. These are good as far as they go ; but the book seems tons of sufficient value to demand something more. The illustrations are singularly interesting.
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