Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/447

 9*s. vm. NOV. so, INI.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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THE DUCHY OF BERWICK.

PROBABLY few names in Europe, save those of the Gaetanis, Orsinis, and Colonnas, can boast so many historical titles as that of Fitz-James. The bead-roll of its honours reads like a chronicle of lost causes. If the Duchy of Berwick recalls the famous general who won Spain for Philip V. and the Duchies of Liria and Xativa for himself at the battle of Almanza, it also recalls his fruitless efforts to restore his father James II. to the British throne ; whilst as Duke of Alba de Tormes the late duke represented the terrible general whose severities cost Spain the Netherlands, and as Duke of Olivares de Penaranda was heir to the Prime Minister whose handsome face is familiar to us on the canvases of Velasquez, and whose obstinacy lost his country not only Portugal, but her place in Europe. As Marquis of Carpio de Coria he reminds us of the Bernardo del Carpio who was one of the proudest names in Spanish history ; as Count of Lemos, of that Duke of Lerraa who is the hero of ' Gil Bias ' ; and as Count of Montijo he was the kinsman not only of the Empress Eugenie, but of St. Dominic, the founder of the Inquisition. His family name of Fitz-James came to him from the alias so often assumed by his ancestor James V. of Scotland during his excursions in the Highlands, which have been rendered memorable by ' The Lady of the Lake,' whilst his other name of Palafox is famous through the heroic defence of Sara- gossa against Napoleon 1.

The Duchy of Berwick was a Spanish and not an English title, although it was origin- ally taken in memory of that conferred upon his son, the ancestor of the late duke, by James II. in 1687, which was lost by an attainder in 1695, after the duke had been proved to be an accomplice in the famous Jacobite plot of that year against William III. To Irishmen the late duke was interesting as the descendant of Honora, Countess Dowager of Lucan, the widow of the heroic Sarsfield. Probably this is the only instance in which a title originally granted by James II. has been revived after an attainder without the consent of the British sovereign, or where (with three exceptions) any foreign sovereign has conferred a title taken from a place in the British Isles. Pope Gregory XIII. created the Devonshire adventurer Stuckeley Marquis of Wexford, and Philip II. created Arthur Dud- ley (who claimed to be the son of Queen Elizabeth by the Earl of Leicester) Duke of Northumberland, a title which might very possibly be claimed, in virtue of various acts

of Philip V., as a Spanish grandeeship, by any one who succeeds in obtaining the revival of the dormant Barony of Wharton, for Pope's famous " Wharton, the shame and wonder of our age," certainly seems to have been recognized in Spain not only as " Duke of Wharton," but as " Duque de Northumber- land," a title originally conferred on him by the Old Pretender.

It is worth notice that our own peerage, despite the long connexion of our sovereigns with the Continent, now contains only four titles taken from foreign places in Europe. Lord Stanhope is Viscount Mahon, from Port Mahon in the island of Minorca, a creation dating from the time when Minorca was an English possession ; whilst the Duke of Wellington is Marquess of Douro (a spelling Portuguese rather than Spanish) and Viscount Wellington of Talavera. Albemarle derives from a place of that name in Normandy, but Clarence derives from Clare in Suffolk ; and the very foreign sounding Montgomery and Scales were, like Harcourt, family names soon after the Conquest. On the other hand, nearly every Italian and Russian noble bears titles derived from three or four different countries on his list of honours ; whilst, of all who claim the title of prince in France, only one person does so in virtue of a patent from a French king, Charles X. The contrast is striking, as it shows not only how completely our nobles have always kept themselves apart from the political life of the Continent, but how thoroughly the really old titled families were exter- minated even before the Reformation. Not one representative in the male line of any one of the barons who signed Magna Charta now sits in the House of Lords, whilst, although many of the earliest Knights of the Garter were subjects of the English king as feudal lords in his possessions in the south of France, not a single title in the peerage is taken from any place south of the Loire ; and two French duchies, three principalities of the Holy Roman 'Empire, one or two imperial countships, and the Spanish, Portuguese, and Netherlands titles held by the Dukes of Wellington and Portland and Lords Albemarle and Clancarty, probably all but exhaust the list of foreign honours held by any persons in the British peerage. Our monarchs, as Queen Elizabeth once said, have always preferred to decorate their own dogs with their own collars, and perhaps the results are to be commended. After all, as Talley- rand remarked, Lord Castlereagh, who was undecorated, looked the most distinguished man at the Congress of Vienna. H.