第95章

Got her judged, not properly sentenced; and then strangled her, he and they, in her bed:--"Jacobea of Baden (1597);" a thrice-tragic history. Then he married again; Jesuits being extremely anxious for an Orthodox heir: but again there came no heir; there came only new blazings of the Nessus'-Shirt. In fine, the poor man died (Spring, 1609), and made the world rid of him. Died 25th March, 1609; that is the precise date;--about a month before our new Elector, Johann Sigismund, got his affairs winded up at the Polish Court, and came galloping home in such haste. There was pressing need of him in the Cleve regions.

For the painful exactitude of Duke Wilhelm and his Lawyers has profited little; and there are claimants on claimants rising for that valuable Cleve Country. As indeed Johann Sigismund had anticipated, and been warned from all quarters, to expect.

For months past, he has had his faculties bent, with lynx-eyed attention, on that scene of things; doubly and trebly impatient to get Preussen soldered up, ever since this other matter came to the bursting-point. What could be done by the utmost vigilance of his Deputies, he had done. It was the 25th of March when the mad Duke died: on the 4th of April, Johann Sigismund's Deputy, attended by a Notary to record the act, "fixed up the Brandenburg Arms on the Government-House of Cleve;" [Pauli, vi. 566.] on the 5th, they did the same at Dusseldorf; on the following days, at Julich and the other Towns. But already on the 5th, they had hardly got done at Dusseldorf, when there appeared--young Wolfgang Wilhelm, Heir-Apparent of that eminent Pfalz-Neuburg, he in person, to put up the Pfalz-Neuburg Arms! Pfalz-Neuburg, who married the Second Daughter, he is actually claiming, then;--the whole, or part?

Both are sensible that possession is nine points in law.

Pfalz-Neuburg's claim was for the whole Duchy. "All my serene Mother's!" cried the young Heir of Pfalz-Neuburg: "Properly all mine!" cried he. "Is not she NEAREST of kin? Second Daughter, true; but the Daughter; not Daughter OF a Daughter, as you are (as your Serene Electress is), O DURCHLAUCHT of Brandenburg:--consider, besides, you are female, I am male!" That was Pfalz-Neuburg's logic: none of the best, I think, in forensic genealogy.

His tenth point was perhaps rather weak; but he had possession, co-possession, and the nine points good. The other Two Sisters, by their Sons or Husbands, claimed likewise; but not the whole:

"Divide it," said they: "that surely is the real meaning of Karl V.'s Deed of Privilege to make such a Testament. Divide it among the Four Daughters or their representatives, and let us all have shares!"Nor were these four claimants by any means all. The Saxon Princes next claimed; two sets of Saxon Princes. First the minor set, Gotha-Weimar and the rest, the Ernestine Line so called;representatives of Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous, who lost the Electorate for religion's sake at Muhlberg in the past century, and from MAJOR became MINOR in Saxon Genealogy. "Magnanimous Johann Friedrich," said they, "had to wife an Aunt of the now deceased Duke of Cleve; Wife Sibylla (sister of the Flanders Mare), of famous memory, our lineal Ancestress. In favor of whom HER Father, the then reigning Duke of Cleve, made a marriage-contract of precisely similar import to this your Prussian one:

he, and barred all his descendants, if contracts are to be valid."This is the claim of the Ernestine Line of Saxon Princes; not like to go for much, in their present disintegrated condition.

But the Albertine Line, the present Elector of Saxony, also claims: "Here is a Deed," said he, "executed by Kaiser Friedrich III. in the year 1483, [Pauli, ubi supra; Hubner, t. 286.]

generations before your Kaiser Karl; Deed solemnly granting to Albert, junior of Sachsen, and to his heirs, the reversion of those same Duchies, should the Male Line happen to fail, as it was then likely to do. How could Kaiser Max revoke his Father's deed, or Kaiser Karl his Great-grandfather's? Little Albert, the Albert of the PRINZENRAUB, he who grew big, and fought lion-like for his Kaiser in the Netherlands and Western Countries; he and his have clearly the heirship of Cleve by right; and we, now grown Electors, and Seniors of Saxony, demand it of a grateful House of Hapsburg,--and will study to make ourselves convenient in return."--"Nay, if that is your rule, that old Laws and Deeds are to come in bar of new, we," cry a multitude of persons,--French Dukes of Nevers, and all manner of remote, exotic figures among them,--"we are the real heirs! Ravensburg, Mark, Berg, Ravenstein, this patch and the other of that large Duchy of yours, were they not from primeval time expressly limited to heirs-male? Heirs-male;and we now are the nearest heirs-male of said patches and portions; and will prove it!"--In short, there never was such a Lawsuit,--so fat an affair for the attorney species, if that had been the way of managing it,--as this of Cleve was likely to prove.

THE KAISER'S THOUGHTS ABOUT IT, AND THE WORLD'S.

What greatly complicated the affair, too, was the interest the Kaiser took in it. The Kaiser could not well brook a powerful Protestant in that country; still less could his Cousin the Spaniard. Spaniards, worn to the ground, coercing that world-famous Dutch Revolt, and astonished to find that they could not coerce it at all, had resolved at this time to take breath before trying farther. Spaniards and Dutch, after Fifty years of such fighting as we know, have made a Twelve-years' Truce (1609): but the battled Spaniard, panting, pale in his futile rage and sweat, has not given up the matter; he is only taking breath, and will try it again. Now Cleve is his road into Holland, in such adventure; no success possible if Cleve be not in good hands.

Brandenburg is Protestant, powerful; Brandenburg will not do for a neighbor there.