HEROES, whether of letters or of arms, have an unhappy knack of disconcerting their admirers and stultifying their panegyrists by utterly uncalled for and amazing selfrevelation. To this category of suicidal autobiographers belongs Colonel-General Sydenham Poyntz, commander of the Northern forces of the Parliament of England against the man Charles Stuart; not, perhaps, a bright particular star, and not over-loved by his soldiers, but always regarded, until a year or two ago, as a bluff, honest Republican, Puritan to the backbone, and rather hardly dealt with by fortune. Indeed, had he

never learned to write he might still be taken at his own valuation: 88 a kind of Miles Standish, who had fought like him on the fields of Flanders for the Protestant faith and faced the point blank bullet of the Spanish arcabucero ; thereafter "knighted by the Emperor on the field of battle"; then atoning for a wayward life by becoming a light of the straitest sect of the Pharisees in Holland; and, finally, returning home to wield the sword of the Lord and Gideon against the Malignants. All this he averred in a published "Defence" of his character against wicked detractors, whose worst charge against him, and that which vexed the good man's righteous

of

soul most, was that he had been a Papist.

That there were flaws in this statement escaped the notice of critics not only of those days but of our own. What Emperor knighted him (and "him" a Protestant hero too) on the field of battle? Poor Ferdinand II. never smelt powder in his life; the Jesuits were far too careful of their patron to let him adventure his person in such fashion. The nearest he ever got to warfare was when, after Wallenstein's murder, he had made for him, as Poyntz tells us, to the admiration of the good folk of Vienna, "a buffe dubblet such as souldiers weare, which certainely will bee a greate encouragement unto the whole Army." But such are but motes compared to the mighty beam which Poyntz contrived as a battering-ram to ruin his own fair fame. It was done with a few thousand strokes of the pen: it served no purpose, and gained him no reward. He merely wrote himself down a rogue, and in respect of historical accuracy a veritable Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, "a liar of the first magnitude."

For being on his return from the High Germany, where he had been fighting once for and twenty times against the Lion of the North, Gustavus Adolphus, he was hospitably entertained by persons whose very acquaintance was in the

year 1637 like to make a man's friends look askance upon him. These were Sir Lewis Tresham and his wife, relatives of one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, and, of course, determined Recusants. To amuse them, as it would appear, he occupied his leisure in setting down all that he could remember of his own life, and a great deal more too. This autobiography he seems to have left with his hosts when he departed; and they fleeing to France, probably to avoid Puritan tyranny, took it with them. It found its way into the National Library of Paris, and now arises thence to blast the character of yet another worthy of the English Revolution, and incidentally to add to the gaiety of nations.

It is pleasing to record one statement of Poyntz which is undoubtedly true, namely, that he was of good family. He was indeed most likely of the same stock as that Yedward Poins who, if slanderous Falstaff could be trusted, aimed to marry his sister to Prince Henry. But Sydenham's branch of the great house had sunk low, and his father, a great musician, and, like many such, more careful of melody than of morals, had dissipated his patrimony. And now his son's lies begin to be an apprentice, says he, "that life I deemed little better than a dog's life and base"; and so ran away to the wars. Nemesis once more arises-this time from the dusty records of the English Law Courts. Will it be believed that the scorner of

servitude was apprenticed not only once, but three times ? His brother William, applying for payment of a bond redeemable at Sydenham's death (the youth was, of course, alive all the time), reveals the fact that he had been transferred from one master to another-always persecuted by them because he would not turn Papist. The real fact was that the whole family were Romanists, and that young Poyntz absconded because he was a lazy, pilfering lad. Possibly when he rode down unarmed citizens in the Guildhall yard twenty years later he was paying off a few old scores.

To the wars he went, but to fight not for but against his Protestant fellow-countrymen. The Romanist Lord Vaux had raised two regiments to serve Spain in the Low CountriesJames of England, be it observed, thereto_consenting,and with them Poyntz trailed the puissant pike-for a very brief spell, for he was presently snapt up (he says: it is quite possible that he deserted) by English soldiers under Captain Sydenham, who was his godfather-a singular coincidence. Under him the young man cheerfully enlisted to serve against his late comrades, took part in the unsuccessful Dutch attempt to relieve Breda, fought manfully there-for spite of his faults he was ever a tall man of his hands,-was wounded, and then, desirous of more stirring service, joined the ranks of "Mansfield's " desperadoes.

Ernest of Mansfeld, bastard

of a great German house devoted to the Spanish interest, is one of the most unhappy characters of an unhappy time. Fighting in Hungary, in Alsace, in Italy, in Bohemia, and fighting heroically everywhere, he served under not two but half a dozen flags, and was accused of betraying each in turn. Warped by his miserable bringing-up, treated alternately as a servant and as a prince, now cursed and now caressed by his octogenarian father, he developed into the first of those devils in men's shape who were called generals in the Thirty Years' War. His devastation of East Friesland, nominally to serve the Dutch, fills one of the most awful pages of history that ever was written. Yet he was of engaging personality-men of such unlucky antecedents often are, and when he came to London to persuade James I. that he was the appointed agent to restore the wandering Queen of Bohemia to her Heidelberg he won all hearts. He was lodged in the apart ments which had been prepared for the Infanta of Spain when she should appear as the bride of Prince Charles. Every county must levy troops for the Deliverer, and when these failed the jails were emptied to furnish recruits. The poor wretches were shipped off to die like flies in the frozen ditches of Holland; but what survived of the force, augmented by Poyntzes and birds of like feather, was to attack the victorious Emperor in his

hereditary To get

stronghold, the lands of Austria. there they were sent by sea to "Stifbreames."

Stifbreames is, being interpreted, the "Stift" or diocese of Bremen. Poyntz's phonetic spelling of German names is a perpetual joy. "Pryson" for Prussia (Preussen) is at any rate better than the old English "Spruce." "Tiring" for "Thüringen," and "Keeping" for "Göppingen" are ingenious. But "Elseschamber" for "Elsass-Zabern," and "Showtcoats for Schafgotzsch," are a little puzzling. Nor do names nearer home appeal to him any more than they did to Milton. "Torphichen" appears as "Tarbychan," and it requires some imagination to extract "Pitsoottie " from "Fiscots."

Mansfeld's raid was but a dismal procession of disaster. English soldiers were disliked by the Protestant Powers they had come to help-not so much for their plundering as for their miserable way of dying in batches, as they did amid the swamps of Brandenburg, not having learned the Landsknecht's way of living at his neighbour's expense. Nor were the hardier Scots much more welcome, as Patrick Gray discovered some three years before, and Hamilton was to find out afterwards. But somehow the ragged crew made their way south to Saxony, where at the Bridge of Dessau Mansfeld was defeated by Wallenstein, in the only real battle

and that rather a chance medley-which the great com

mander ever fought and won. Poyntz was not there, it seems, but he was at the taking of Rogäz a day or two before, where the garrison, every man of them enchanted and bulletproof, had to be clubbed to death with musquet - butts. Defeated but never crushed, Mansfeld struggled on into Hungary, Sydenham with him, and there the talent of the latter for pure fiction first displays itself.

He begins with a picturesque account of the poisoning of Mansfeld at a feast by the Pasha of Belgrade. That commander really died two hundred miles from Belgrade, in a vain attempt to force his way through to Venice. And then comes that without no romance of the time was complete: the Turkish captivity; the cruel master (appropriately named Bully Basha), the compassionate beauty of the harem; the attempted escape, of course frustrated and severely punished; and the final success. The episode of the compassionate beauty is illustrated by details which must have weighed on the conscience of the future Puritan captain, and ought to have shocked Lady Tresham, and the whole story is embellished by incidents such as swimming over "Danubius the river" (it is fairly wide at Buda-Pesth, but as Poyntz thought it flowed from east to west, he was probably not aware of the fact), serving in the galleys at Belgrade (how gat they there?) and the like, which at

least reflect credit on the writer's power of detachment from the truth. But the account of his recapture is worth quoting: "Their met mee 8 party of Turkes who were sent as skoutes to watch the ennemyes army; some of them presently knew me and seised upon mee, then tying a double bag full of filth earth and stones, having thrust my head thorough the middle tyed it with a fast knot, and so drave mee before them to new Buda where they delivered me to my maister's sonne who gave me 300 blows upon the soles of my feet," and so on: but did ever any leather-wearing Englishman recover from such a bastinado without being lamed for life?

To

In the end Sydenham escaped by stealing a horse and riding away on it into Christian Hungary, where to his infinite chagrin the beast was in turn stolen from him by a party of haiduks. this loss he recurs again and again as one of the greatest misfortunes of his life: "O how that went to my heart to part with my horse, which had brought mee out of the Devill's mouth and so neare Christindome, I meane Austria, where hee would have given mee a hundred pound if some other had had hym, but no remedy!" However, to Austria he got "by many jeeres," and there the future Elder of the Dutch Church was for the third or fourth time "converted." Wandering in the wild, he met with "a poore English Franciscan fryer whose

name was More with a Wallet on his backe full of bread and scraps which hee had begged thereabouts for his covent about Vienna." But the poor Franciscan friar seems to have had backers, who were able to equip Poyntz "de cap a pied" with a good horse under him and a purse of a hundred angels in his pocket to go and fight against the Lion of the North.

All this was not done for nothing: "At length they broke with me which was the true religion, which they proved to be no other than that which commonly is called Papistry, and their reasons were 80 strong, joined with such wonderful humility and charity towards mee, that I could not choose but admit of it and follow their advise therein, which was to bee made a member of that holy Church and wherein by God's grace I mean to dy considering it could not be but done by God's speciall grace towards me, leading me as it were by the hand out of my slavery to come to meet with so holy a company." Very pleasant reading for the Treshams, no doubt, but hardly in accordance with the words of Poyntz's own "Vindication." He is not troubled by the accusation of Papistry, "it being in the power of so many thousands to vindicate me, who have been witnesses of my constant profession which from my first years, according to the instructions of this my native country have been in the Reformed Protestant religion, and aocordingly have for many years

been an Elder of the Dutch Church as is very well known." And all the time a "pièce de conviction," without equal, was lying in Paris! Possibly, if Bully Basha could have added his testimony, Islam itself might have claimed the Elder as an adherent.

Ao

It was no fault of Sydenham's that he had for a while to fight for and not against the Protestant Hero; for when he got to "Drayson " (Dresden) he found that drunken John George of Saxony was for the time being "good Swedish,' and he had to fight, and run away, with the Saxon contingent at Breitenfeld. cording to his own account, he stood up manfully to the "Beer-king of Leipzig" when that worthy found himself in safety. "Little Englishman," said the Duke, "you fled too; you deserve to be hanged for you run from your colours also"; but says Poyntz, "I told his grace that my Colours run from me, and then quoth I it was time for me to run also: for he that carried them run away as the rest did, and threw his Colours away, and I coming after took them up and here they are, and so delivered them to his grace,' who presently thereafter made him a captain.

This is possibly true: hypoorite and impostor as he was, no one could ever impeach Poyntz's personal bravery. But nothing can excuse his malignant slanders of the king he had for once fought for. Gustavus Adolphus is for him a monster. No Jesuit calumnies