Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/89

 10* s. i. JAX. as, MM.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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this hardly affects the point at issue. A ver t readable account of Walter Reinhard and his wife is given in that excellent book ' A Parti cular Account of the Military Adventurers o Hindostan,' by Mr. Herbert Compton (Fisher Unwin, 1893), Appendix, pp. 400-410, to which is added a portrait of the Begum. It may be added that by a slip of the pen the Governor General, whose letter to the Begum is quotec by MR. HEBB, is called " Sir yVilliam Ben- tinck." His name was Lord William Caven- dish Bentinck. Reinhard's origin was uncer tain, but he was generally supposed to have been a Swiss.

As regards Madame du Deffand's letters to Horace Wai pole, it may be as well to quote the passage from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's letter in theAtkencBum of 13 July, 1901 previously referred to by the Editor which specifically relates to them :

"After Dyce Sombre's death in 1851 the letters passed with the rest of the Du Deffand papers into the possession of his widow, who afterwards married the Hon. George Cecil Forester (sub- sequently third Lord Forester). By Lady Forester, who was a daughter of the second Viscount St. Vin- cent, they were bequeathed to her nephew, Mr. W. R. Parker-Jervis, of Meafprd, near Stone, in Staffordshire, in whose possession they now are." W. F. PRIDEAUX.

Presuming that "Sir William Bentinck is a mistake for Lord William Bentinck, one can only conclude that that benevolent noble- man himself one of India's greatest bene- factors, inasmuch as he suppressed the Thugs and put an end to the cruel rite of suttee would never have written to the Begurn Somroo the complimentary letter quoted at the last reference unless he had been ignorant of the woman's history in its entirety. His lordship cannot have known that this estimable lady had been the wife and, until his death in 1778, the close associate of the execrable German ruffian Reinhard, alias Somers, alias Sombre, the monster who super- intended, and with his own hands assisted in perpetrating, the appalling massacre at Patna, when some 200 unarmed European prisoners were barbarously done to death in cold blood. Nor can the Governor-General have been aware of the fact that his esteemed lady friend had herself on one occasion, as a punishment for an offence far short of murder, caused two of her slave girls to be flogged and then buried alive immediately in front of her tent. The fact that the Begum was a woman of no ordinary parts only aggravates her misdeeds, and renders them the more indefensible. By all means let this unhappy female have full credit for the good works of her later life. Her charities were immense,

and she died in the odour of sanctity. But in estimating her character and career we are bound to take into consideration what she had been ; and I for one cannot agree that it is a "trifling mistake" to invest the wicked adventuress Somroo with the style and title of a great feudatory princess who, by reason of the staunch loyalty of her house to the British Government, is entitled to the hearty esteem of every Briton.

CHUTTER MUNZIL.

MR. HEBBspeaksof "Zeibool-Nissa," instead of Zeb-ul-Nissa, the correct name of the lady in question. The latter words mean orna- ment of the female sex, just as Aurungzeb means ornament of the throne ; whereas "Zeib" has no meaning, and no such word or verbal factor exists in the Arabic or Persian languages. PATRICK MAXWELL.

Bath.

EXCOMMUNICATION OF Louis XIV. (9 th S. xii. 468, 508). I, too, have been unable to find any mention of Louis XIV. having been excommunicated, but extract the following from M. - N. Bouillet's ' Diet. Universe! d'Histoire et de Geographic' :

" Lavardin (Ch.-Henri de Beaumanoir, marquis de), 1643-1701, lieutenant general au gouverneraenb de Bretagne, fut envoye par Louis XIV. en ambas- sade & Rome (1687) au moment ou le roi avait avec le pape Innocent XI. de vifs demel^s au sujet des Franchises et des articles gallicans de 1682. II entra dans Rome avec une troupe armee, malgre" les defenses du Saint - Pere. Celui - ci refusa de le recevoir et 1'excommunia. Louis XIV. se pr^parait

venger son ambassadeur quand Innocent mourut."

EDWARD LATHAM.

See Louis Pierre Anquetil's 'Histoire de France' (published by Furne & Cie., Paris,


 * 852), VOl iv. pp. 224-6. GRENOVICENSIS.

EPITAPH (9 th S. xii. 504). In 'Curious Epitaphs' (1899), collected and edited with notes by William Andrews, this epitaph iuly appears. John Scott is there said to mve been "a Liverpool brewer."

JOHN T. PAGE. West Haddon, Northamptonshire.

'Epitaphs, Quaint, Curious, and Elegant,' )ublished by Tegg, locates this epitaph at Jpton- on -Severn, and adds that " poor John Scott " was a Liverpool brewer.

RICHARD LAWSON.

Urmston.

HEBER'S ' PALESTINE ' (9 th S. xii. 246, 514). There is something more than a resem- blance of words in the parallel that I pointed rat. There is a resemblance of ideas. There s not the same resemblance between the