Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/99

 9 th S. V. FEB. 3, 1900.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

91

Lord Wellington, announcing his promotion to Field-Marshal ;-=-

" As a mark of the sense he [the Prince Regent] entertains of your Lordship's distinguished services, he has conferred upon your Lordship the rank of Field-Marshal. If this promotion be unexampled in our military service, it must be also recollected that the occasion on which it is granted cannot be matched." 'Suppl. Despatches,' viii. 49.

Taken in conjunction with the following from Col. Torrens, military secretary, to Lord Wellington, it is obvious that by " un- exampled" Lord Bathurst referred to the elevation of a junior general over so many seniors :

" Allow me to congratulate you upon being made a Field-Marshal. You may possibly have heard that the Duke of York has hitherto thought that such promotion would embarrass the public service ; but without entering into any explanation upon such a point, it is a justice I owe to His Royal Highness to assure you most solemnly that I never saw him forward any measure with so much eagerness and self-satisfaction as your promotion upon this occasion."

HERBERT MAXWELL.

Surely it is COL. PRIDEAUX and not the Athenaeum reviewer who has "fallen into error." A asserts that no person had been promoted to the rank of Field-Marshal for a period of fifty years prior to the date when Wellington was raised to that dignity. B says this is an error because a similar promotion had been made seventeen or eighteen years before. How does this imply that there were no such promotions between that quoted by A and that quoted by B ] Clearly all that is neces- sary is for B to quote a later date than the one already mentioned by A. Whether there are any cases between the two dates or after B's date does not affect the question. Seven- teen is less than fifty, even though many numbers come between them, and though ten and five are still less than seventeen.

F. W. READ.

GENERAL LAMBERT IN GUERNSEY (9 th S. v. 7). In Chambers' s Edinburgh Journal for December, 1846 (pp. 396-7), appears a "narrative' 1 entitled 'Isabella de Lorma.' From the style in which it is presented one would almost imagine that the writer in- tended it to be taken as fact. " General Lambert, one of those stern and desperate men who had been concerned in the trial and condemnation of Charles I.," is discovered " one day about the middle of the seventeenth century " on the small island of Sorreno, in the Caribbean Sea, by the commander of a buccaneer vessel, a man named Cleveland. After his banishment to Guernsey, Lambert had eloped with the Donna de Lorma to

St. Domingo, where he hoped to marry her. Instead of allowing this, the Spanish maiden's relatives, on hearing her story, put Lambert ashore at Sorreno, where he was found by Cleveland. The whilom Parliamentary general is eventually taken on board the buccaneer and landed in Jamaica. " From hence Lam- bert took himself to his appointed retreat in Guernsey, where he died after an agreeable and tranquil sojourn." Is there any truth in this story 1 JOHN T. PAGE.

West Haddon, Northamptonshire.

See F. B. Tupper's ' History of Guernsey,' 1854, where the exact date of Lambert's arrival in the island is given, p. 322, on the authority of Peter Le Roy. On p. 334 Tupper says that

"in 1666 Guernsey was placed in a posture of defence, the French having then some design on

the islands It was at this time that the captain

of the isles of Chausey (Vaucour) was detected in Guernsey when tampering with some of the in- habitants whom he suspected of disaffection, and

particularly with General Lambert But the

general, it seems, preferred any government to a French one, and therefore, [he] having made a free discovery, Vaucour was apprehended and, as a con- victed spy, suffered death. It may have been this discovery which procured for Lambert the favour of his removal to England."

It is odd that a Guernsey man like Mr. Tupper should have regarded Lambert's removal to " the fortified island of St. Nicholas at the entrance of Plymouth " as a favour ; whereas MR. R. J. KING, whose note on p. 340 of l sfc S. iv. was referred to on p. 7 of the current volume, says that "probably it was thought a safer (and certainly, if he were confined in the little island of St. Nicholas, it was a severer) prison than Guernsey." Mr. Firth, in the 'Diet. Nat. Biog.,' points out that, after having been allowed a certain measure of liberty in Guernsey in 1664, Lambert " was again closely confined for a time, and in 1666, a plot for his escape having been discovered, Hatton [the governor of Guernsey] was instructed to shoot his prisoner if the French effected a land- ing The clandestine marriage of Mary Lambert

with the governor's son, Charles Hatton, further strained Lambert's relations with the governor, and in 1667 he was removed to the island of St. Nicholas, in Plymouth Sound."

Mary Lambert was, I suppose, the lady whom in 1659 Hatton had himself suggested as a suitable match for the king. D. C. I.

FATHER GORDON (9 th S. v. 28). There has been more than one priest of this name (mostly Jesuit fathers) living in France during the last two centuries, filling clerical or scholastic offices. I think, however, the