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 IMPOSTORS

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IMPOSTORS

without ever having received episcopal consecration. He was at first admitted as a bishop auxihary by Florentius, Bishop of Utrecht. Great scandal and disturbance were caused when the truth was discov- ered, on account of the large numbers of persons whom he had (of course invalidly) ordained priests. He was solemnly degraded, in 1.392, by a commission of seven bishops and on being handed over to the secu- lar arm was sentenced to be boiled alive, but this sen- tence was mitigated in execution. Nothing, however, could more clearly illustrate the extent to which a period of civil war encourages visionaries and religious impostors than the history of France's sainted heroine, Joan of Arc. In fact the principal obstacle to the recognition of her own inspiration has been found in the circumstance that several other visionaries, of whom Catherine of La Rochelle was the most noted, claimed similar Divine missions at about the same period. The facts have been exaggerated for their own purposes by such writers as Vallet de Viriville (Charles VII, II, 129) and Anatole France (Jeanne d'Arc, II, 96); but there certainlj' were a number of such impostors, both male and female; and in particu- lar five years after the Maid was burnt at the stake another woman impersonated her, was received at Orleans as the true Joan of Arc, and found influen- tial supporters in that character for more than three years.

Other cases of imposture in the fifteenth century were undoubtedly fostered by the Wycliffite and Hus- site heresies. If Sir John Oklcastle, the Wycliffite martyr, really believed, as is asserted on good contem- porary authority, that he would rise again three days after his death, he was clearly the victim of tlelusions, but the details associated with the veneration of the ashes of Richard Wyche, burned in 1440 (Gairdner, "Lollardy ", 1, 171), imply some admixture of deliberate fraud, in Germany the social revolt so largely en- couraged by Hussite doctrines was turned to account by more than one adventurer. Johann Bohm, who in 1476 gathered round him a crowd of peasants, num- bering sometimes as many as 30,000, at Niklashausen in Franconia, seems to have been the tool of Hussites more astute than himself. He professed to have had revelations from the Blessed Virgin, and declared war upon all recognition of priestly authority, upon the payment of tithes, and in fact upon all property. He was eventually captured by the Bishop of Wurzl)urg and burnt (Janssen, "Gesch. d. deutschen Volkes", II, 401). Somewhat similar in its partially social aims was the rebellion on English soil of Jack Cade, who professed to be a descendant of the Earls of Mor- timer. How far these pretensions and a certain mountebank element in his character gained him his influence over his followers it is difficult to decide. After London had for a day or two been in the hands of the rebels, the revolt was put down, and Cade eventually slain (1450). Two other impostures of somewhat later date — those of Lambert Simnel (1487), who pretended to be the son of the murdered Duke of Clarence, and Perkin Warbeck (1497), who announced himself as Richard Duke of York, the younger of the two princes believed to have been smothered in the Tower — are famous in English history, but neither of them had any religious character. For the same rea- son we need not touch here upon sundry other noted impersonations of characters of royal dignity, e. g. the Alexis Comnenus who appeared in the twelfth century as the rival of Isaac Comnenus II; the Baldwin who appeared in Flanders in 1225 after the death of the true Bald^\-in in the East; the adventurer who imper- sonated Frederic II and who when seized and tortured by the Emperor Rudolph in 1284 confessed the fraud, not to speak of several others. Two similar pretend- ers to royalty, however, are of more consequence, and the impersonation, if impersonation it was, is buried in deeper mysterj\ When King Sebastian of Portugal

in 1578 fought his last desperate battle against the Moors upon African soil, there was some conflict of evidence regarding the manner of his death, and though what purported to he his dead body was brought back and interred in Portugal, rumours per- sistently circulated that he had escajied and was still alive. Influenced by the fact that Philip II of Spain now claimed and occupied the throne of the sister kingdom, a whole series of pretenders appeared, each averring that he was in truth the Sebastian whom men believed to have perished. The first three of these claimants were vulgar rogues, but the fourth played his part with extraordinary firmness and consummate ability. He obtained recognition from a number of people who had known Sebastian well, and though the Spanish Viceroy of Naples seized him and sent him to the galleys, he seems to have been treated by the Spanish authorities with a curious degree of considera- tion. Even now it cannot be affirmed with absolute certainty that his story was a false one, though nearly all historians pronounce against him.

Still more doubtful is the case of " the false Deme- trius ". The true Demetrius, the son of Tsar Ivan, the Terrible, was murdered in 1592. Muscovy after Ivan's death fell into terrible anarchy, anil not long afterwards there appeared in Poland a young man who declared that he was Demetrius who had escaped the massacre, and that he now meant to press his claim to the throne of the Tsars. Sigismund, King of Poland, lent him his support. He made himself mas- ter of Moscow and was generally received with enthu- siasm, although he made no secret of the fact that during his residence in Poland he had adopted the Roman Faith. Probably the merits of the historical controversy as to his identity ha\e never been quite fairly judged, because all have agreed in describing him as a tool of the Jesuits, and have, consequently, taken it for granted that the whole claim was a politi- cal coup devised by them to draw Russia over to the Roman oliedionce. It has, however, been clearly shown how doulitful is the assumption that Demetrius was really an impostor. (See Pierling, " Rome et Demetrius", Paris, 1S7.S; and " La Russie et le Saint- Siege" of the same author.) Of the other royal pre- tenders, and notably of the si.\ various adventurers who came forward in the character of the Dauphin Louis, the son of Louis XVI, there is no need to say anything. Neither need we linger over such fantastic personages as Paracelsus (Philip Bombast von Hohen- heim, 1493-1541), who, despite his parade of cabbalistic formula^ and his pretence of Divine inspiration, was really for his age a scientific genius, or Nostradamus (1503-1566), the Parisian astrologer and prophet, who also practised as a physician, or Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743-1795), who died in the dungeons of the Castle of Sant' Angelo after an almost unprecedented career of fraud, in which a sort of freemasonry, called "Egyptian Masonry", invented by him in England, played a notable part. Such English astrologers on the other hand as John Dee (1527-160S), who.se life has recentlv been WTitten bv C. F. Smith (1909), William Lily (1602-1681), and John Gadbury (1627- 1704), seem to have been sincere believers in their own strange science, and that curious character, Valentine Greatrakes (1629-1683), was not a mere charlatan but undoubtedly possessed some natural gift of liealing. More to our purpose are a numlicr of feigned or de- luded ecstaticas w'ho often traded upon the popular credulity in countries like Spain that were ready to welcome the miraculous. Amongst the most famous of the.se was Magdalena de la Cruz (1487-1560), a Franciscan nun of Cordova, who for many years was honoured as a saint. She was believed to have the stigmata and to take no other food than the Holy Eucharist. The Blessed Sacrament was said to fly to her tongue from the hand of the priest who was giving Holy Communion, and it seemed at svich moments that