A Look at Sabatini's Sources for "The Night of Nuptials" and The Romantic Prince

by Claudia Rex

In the preface to the first volume of The Historical Nights Entertainment (1917), Rafael Sabatini introduces his project as follows:

In approaching "The Historical Nights Entertainment" I set myself the task of reconstructing in the fullest possible detail and with all the color available from surviving records, a group of more or less famous events. I would select for my purposes those which were in themselves bizarre and resulting from the interplay of human passions, and whilst relating each of these events in the form of a story, I would compel that story scrupulously to follow the actual, recorded facts without owing anything to fiction, and I would draw upon my imagination, if at all, merely as one might employ color to fill in the outlines which history leaves gray, taking care that my color should be as true to nature as possible...

How nearly I may have approached success—judged by the standard I had set myself—how far I may have fallen short, my readers will discern. I am conscious, however, of having in the main dutifully resisted the temptation to take the easier road, to break away from restricting fact for the sake of achieving a more intriguing narrative. In one instance, however, I have quite deliberately failed...

My deliberate failure is "The Night of Nuptials." I discovered an allusion to the case of Charles the Bold and Sapphira Danvelt in Macaulay's History of England—quoted from an old number of the Spectator—whilst I was working upon the case of Lady Alice Lisle. There a similar episode is mentioned as being related of Colonel Kirke, but discredited because known for a story that has a trick of springing up to attach itself to unscrupulous captains. I set out to track it to its source, and having found its first appearance to be in connection with Charles the Bold's German captain Rhynsault, I attempted to reconstruct the event as it might have happened, setting it at least in surroundings of solid fact.

"The Night of Nuptials," describes how justice is obtained by Sapphira Danvelt following the wrongful death of her husband Philip at the hands of Claud of Rhynsault, governor of the province of Zeeland. The central character in this story is not Sapphira, but rather Duke Charles of Burgundy, surnamed the Bold. In this respect, the story follows the pattern of its telling in the "Spectator", and it may be read as a "trickster tale," a genre descriptive of many of Sabatini's short stories, and one from which he obviously derived much enjoyment.

This story is of interest to readers, first in affording a glimpse of how Sabatini built imaginatively on his historical sources, for he identifies in his preface the precise passages in Macaulay and the Spectator that sparked his initial interest. Better yet, Sabatini returned to this tale in 1929, making it the basis for the novel The Romantic Prince.

In 1917, Sabatini described Sapphira's meeting with Duke Charles in this fashion:

Under the June sunshine the opulent city of Bruges hummed with activity like the great human hive it was. For Bruges at this date was the market of the world, the very centre of the world's commerce, the cosmopolis of the age...

It was past noon, and the great belfry above the Gothic Cloth Hall in the Grande Place was casting a lengthening shadow athwart the crowded square. Above the babel of voices sounded on a sudden the note of a horn, and there was a cry of "The Duke! The Duke!" followed by a general scuttle of the multitude to leave a clear way down the middle of the great square.

A gorgeous cavalcade some two score strong came into sight...

It was a splendid iridescent company, flaunting in its apparel every color of the prism...

...And then at last came the young Duke himself, in black, as if to detach himself from the surrounding splendour. He was of middle stature, of a strong and supple build, with a lean, swarthy face and lively eyes. Beside him, on a white horse, rode a dazzling youth dressed from head to foot in flame-coloured silk, a peaked bonnet of black velvet set upon his lovely golden head, a hooded falcon perched upon his left wrist, a tiny lute slung behind him by a black ribbon. He laughed as he rode, looking the very incarnation of youth and gaiety.

When Sapphira Danvelt, watching from the sidelines, cries out "Justice, my Lord Duke of Burgundy! Justice, Lord Duke for a woman's wrongs!" it is the golden-haired youth who picks her out of the crowd and brings her to the Duke's attention with a tug on his sleeve.

In the 1929 retelling, Sabatini's view of the world had grown darker and more complex. Sapphira—renamed Johanna—seeks the Duke in Brussels, "at a time when the snow lay thick upon the land, and the ice was everywhere..." As one among a horde of petitioners, Johanna faces weeks of waiting before finding a means of gaining the Duke's attention. However, if you look closely, I believe that you will find the golden-haired youth of 1917 reborn, not as the Duke's companion Count Anthony of Egmont, with whom he shares a few superficial traits, but in the person of a certain young archer who is nephew to the cardinal of Ghent. Other similarities and differences in plot and characterization between the short story and the novel are well worth exploring.

Spectator:

No. 491. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1712.

—Digna satis fortuna revisit.

VIRG. Aen. iii. 318.

A just reverse of fortune on him waits.

IT is common with me to run from book to book to exercise my mind with many objects, and qualify myself for my daily labours. After an hour spent in this loitering way of reading, something will remain to be food to the imagination. The writings that please me most on such occasions are stories, for the truth of which there is good authority. The mind of man is naturally a lover of justice; and when we read a story wherein a criminal is overtaken, in whom there is no quality which is the object of pity, the soul enjoys a certain revenge for the offence done to its nature, in the wicked actions committed in the preceding part of the history. This will be better understood by the reader from the following narration itself, than from any thing which I can say to introduce it.

WHEN Charles Duke of Burgundy, surnamed The Bold, reigned over spacious dominions now swallowed up by the power of France, he heaped many favours and honours upon Claudius Rhynsault, a German, who had served him in his wars against the insults of his neighbours. A great part of Zealand was at that time in subjection to that dukedom. The prince himself was a person of singular humanity and justice. Rhynsault, with no other real quality than courage, had dissimulation enough to pass upon his generous and unsuspicious master for a person of blunt honesty and fidelity, without any vice that could bias him from the execution of justice. His highness, prepossessed to his advantage, upon the decease of the governor of his chief town of Zealand, gave Rhynsault that command. He was not long seated in that government, before he cast his eyes upon Sapphira, a woman of exquisite beauty, the wife of Paul Danvelt, a wealthy merchant of the city under his protection and government. Rhynsault was a man of a warm constitution and violent inclination to women, and not unskilled in the soft arts which win their favour. He knew what it was to enjoy the satisfactions which are reaped from the possession of beauty, but was an utter stranger to the decencies, honours, and delicacies, that attend the passion towards them in elegant minds. However, he had so much of the world, that he had a great share of the language which usually prevails upon the weaker part of that sex; and he could with his tongue utter a passion with which his heart was wholly untouched. He was one of those brutal minds which can be gratified with the violation of innocence and beauty, without the least pity, passion, or love to that with which they are so much delighted. Ingratitude is a vice inseparable to a lustful man; and the possession of a woman by him, who has no thought but allaying a passion painful to himself, is necessarily followed by distaste and aversion.

Rhynsault, being resolved to accomplish his will on the wife of Danvelt, left no arts untried to get into a familiarity at her house; but she knew his character and disposition too well, not to shun all occasions that might ensnare her into his conversation. The governor, despairing of success by ordinary means, apprehended and imprisoned her husband, under pretence of an information, that he was guilty of a correspondence with the enemies of the duke to betray the town into their possession. This design had its desired effect; and the wife of the unfortunate Danvelt, the day before that which was appointed for his execution, presented herself in the hall of the governor's house, and as he passed through the apartment, threw herself at his feet, and holding his knees, beseeched his mercy. Rhynsault beheld her with a dissembled satisfaction; and, assuming an air of thought and authority, he bid her arise, and told her she must follow him to his closet; and, asking her whether she knew the hand of the letter he pulled out of his pocket, went from her, leaving this admonition aloud: "If you will save your husband, you must give me an account of all you know without prevarication; for every body is satisfied he was too fond of you to be able to hide from you the names of the rest of the conspirators, or any other particulars whatsoever." He went to his closet, and soon after the lady was sent for to an audience. The servant knew his distance when matters of state were to be debated; and the governor, laying aside the air with which he had appeared in public, began to be the supplicant, to rally an affliction, which it was in her power easily to remove, and relieve an innocent man from his imprisonment. She easily perceived his intention; and, bathed in tears, began to deprecate so wicked a design. Lust, like ambition, takes all the faculties of the mind and body into its service and subjection. Her becoming tears, her honest anguish, the wringing of her hands, and the many changes of her posture and figure in the vehemence of speaking, were but so many attitudes in which he beheld her beauty, and further incentives of his desire. All humanity was lost in that one appetite, and he signified to her in so many plain terms, that he was unhappy till he had possessed her, and nothing less should be the price of her husband's life: and she must before the following noon pronounce the death, or enlargement, of Danvelt. After this notification, when he saw Sapphira enough again distracted, to make the subject of their discourse to common eyes appear different from what it was, he called servants to conduct her to the gate. Loaded with insupportable affliction, she immediately repairs to her husband; and, having signified to his gaolers that she had a proposal to make to her husband from the governor, she was left alone with him, revealed to him all that had passed, and represented the endless conflict she was in between love to his person, and fidelity to his bed. It is easy to imagine the sharp affliction this honest pair was in upon such an incident in lives not used to any but ordinary occurrences. The man was bridled, by shame from speaking what his fear prompted, upon so near an approach of death; but let fall words that signified to her, he should not think her polluted, though she had not yet confessed to him that the governor had violated her person, since he knew her will had no part in the action. She parted from him with this oblique permission to save a life he had not resolution enough to resign for the safety of his honour.

The next morning the unhappy Sapphira attended the governor, and being led into a remote apartment, submitted to his desires. Rhynsault commended her charms, claimed her familiarity after what had passed between them, and, with an air of gaiety, in the language of a gallant, bid her return, and take her husband out of prison: "but," continued he, "my fair one must not be offended that I have taken care he should not be an interruption to our future assignations." These last words foreboded what she found when she came to the gaol—her husband executed by the order of Rhynsault!

It was remarkable that the woman, who was full of tears and lamentations during the whole course of her affliction, uttered neither sigh nor complaint, but stood fixed with grief at this consummation of her misfortunes. She betook herself to her abode; and, after having in solitude paid her devotions to Him who is the avenger of innocence, she repaired privately to court. Her person, and a certain grandeur of sorrow, negligent of forms, gained her passage into the presence of the duke her sovereign. As soon as she came into the presence, she broke forth into the following words: "Behold, O mighty Charles, a wretch weary of life, though it has always been spent with innocence and virtue. It is not in your power to redress my injuries, but it is to avenge them. And if the protection of the distressed, and the punishment of oppressors, is a task worthy a prince, I bring the duke of Burgundy ample matter for doing honour to his own great name, and wiping infamy off of mine."

When she had spoken this, she delivered the duke a paper reciting her story. He read it with all the emotions that indignation and pity could raise in a prince jealous of his honour in the behaviour of his officers, and prosperity of his subjects.

Upon an appointed day, Rhynsault was sent for to court, and, in the presence of a few of the council, confronted by Sapphira. The prince asking, "Do you know that lady?" Rhynsault, as soon as he could recover his surprise, told the duke he would marry her, if his highness would please to think that a reparation. The duke seemed contented with this answer, and stood by during the immediate solemnization of the ceremony. At the conclusion of it he told Rhynsault, "Thus far you have done as constrained by my authority: I shall not be satisfied of your kind usage of her, without you sign a gift of your whole estate to her after your decease." To the performance of this also the duke was a witness. When these two acts were executed, the duke turned to the lady, and told her, "It now remains for me to put you in quiet possession of what your husband has so bountifully bestowed on you"; and ordered the immediate execution of Rhynsault.

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From: Lord Macaulay, The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second

(Philadelphia: The University Library Association, 1898), 2:346B52

...Politicians, who, in 1807, had sought to curry favor with George the Third by defending Caroline of Brunswick, were not ashamed, in 1820, to curry favor with George the Fourth by persecuting her. But in 1820, as in 1807, the whole body of working men was fanatically devoted to her cause. So it was with Monmouth. In 1680 he had been adored alike by the gentry and by the peasantry of the West. In 1685 he came again. To the gentry he had become an object of aversion: but by the peasantry he was still loved with a love strong as death, with a love not to be extinguished by misfortunes or faults, by the flight from Sedgemoor, by the letter from Ringwood, or by the tears and abject supplications at Whitehall. The charge which may with justice be brought against the common people is, not that they are inconstant, but that they almost invariably choose their favorite so ill that their constancy is a vice and not a virtue.

Cruelties of the Soldiers in the West

While the execution of Monmouth occupied the thoughts of the Londoners, the counties which had risen against the government were enduring all that a ferocious soldiery could inflict. Feversham had been summoned to the court, where honors and rewards which he little deserved awaited him. He was made a Knight of the Garter and Captain of the first and most lucrative troop of Life Guards: but Court and City laughed at his military exploits; and the wit of Buckingham gave forth its last feeble flash at the expense of a general who had won a battle in bed.¹ Feversham left in command at Bridgewater Colonel Percy Kirke, a military adventurer whose vices had been developed by the worst of all schools, Tangier. Kirke had during some years commanded the garrison of that town, and had been constantly employed in hostilities against tribes of foreign barbarians, ignorant of the laws which regulate the warfare of civilized and Christian nations. Within the ramparts of his fortress he was a despotic prince. The only check on his tyranny was the fear of being called to account by a distant and a careless government. He might, therefore safely proceed to the most audacious excesses of rapacity, licentiousness, and cruelty. He lived with boundless dissoluteness, and procured by extortion the means of indulgence. No goods could be sold till Kirke had had the refusal of them. No question of right could be decided till Kirke had been bribed. Once, merely from a malignant whim, he staved all the wine in a vintner's cellar. On another occasion he drove all the Jews from Tangier. Two of them he sent to the Spanish Inquisition, which forthwith burned them. Under this iron domination scarce a complaint was heard; for hatred was effectually kept down by terror. Two persons who had been refractory were found murdered; and it was universally believed that they had been slain by Kirke's order. When his soldiers displeased him, he flogged them with merciless severity: but he indemnified them by permitting them to sleep on watch, to reel drunk about the streets, to rob, beat, and insult the merchants and the laborers.

When Tangier was abandoned, Kirke returned to England. He still continued to command his old soldiers, who were designated sometimes as the First Tangier Regiment, and sometimes as Queen Catharine's Regiment. As they had been levied for the purpose of waging war on an infidel nation, they bore on their flag a Christian emblem, the Paschal Lamb. In allusion to this device, and with a bitterly ironical meaning, these men, the rudest and most ferocious in the English army, were called Kirke's Lambs. The regiment, now the second of the line, still retains this ancient badge, which is however thrown into the shade by decorations honorably earned in Egypt, in Spain, and in the heart of Asia².

Such was the captain and such the soldiers who were now let loose on the people of Somersetshire. From Bridgewater Kirke marched to Taunton. He was accompanied by two carts filled with wounded rebels whose gashes had not been dressed, and by a long drove of prisoners on foot, who were chained two and two. Several of these he hanged as soon as he reached Taunton, without the form of a trial. They were not suffered even to take leave of their nearest relations. The sign post of the White Hart Inn served for a gallows. It is said that the work of death went on in sight of the windows where the officers of the Tangier regiment were carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When the legs of the dying men quivered in the last agony, the colonel ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said, music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of the captives was not even allowed the indulgence of a speedy death. Twice he was suspended from the sign post, and twice cut down. Twice he was asked if he repented of his treason; and twice he replied that, if the thing were to do again, he would do it. Then he was tied up for the last time. So many dead bodies were quartered that the executioner stood ankle deep in blood. He was assisted by a poor man whose loyalty was suspected, and who was compelled to ransom his own life by seething the remains of his friends in pitch. The peasant who had consented to perform this hideous office afterward returned to his plough. But a mark like that of Cain was upon him. He was known through his village by the horrible name of Tom Boilman. The rustics long continued to relate that, though he had, by his sinful and shameful deed, saved himself from the vengeance of the Lambs, he had not escaped the vengeance of a higher power. In a great storm he fled for shelter under an oak, and was there struck dead by lightning³.

The number of those who were thus butchered cannot now be ascertained. Nine were entered in the parish registers of Taunton: but those registers contained the names of such only as had Christian burial. Those who were hanged in chains, and those whose heads and limbs were sent to the neighboring villages, must have been much more numerous. It was believed in London, at the time, that Kirke put a hundred captives to death during the week which followed the battle⁴.

Cruelty, however, was not this man's only passion. He loved money; and was no novice in the arts of extortion. A safe conduct might be bought of him for thirty or forty pounds; and such a safe conduct, though of no value in law, enabled the purchaser to pass the posts of the Lambs without molestation, to reach a seaport, and to fly to a foreign country. The ships which were bound for New England were crowded at this juncture with so many fugitives from Sedgemoor that there was great danger lest the water and provisions should fail⁵.

Kirke was also, in his own coarse and ferocious way, a man of pleasure; and nothing is more probable than that he employed his power for the purpose of gratifying his licentious appetites. It was reported that he conquered the virtue of a beautiful woman by promising to spare the life of one to whom she was strongly attached, and that, after she had yielded, he showed her, suspended on the gallows, the lifeless remains of him for whose sake she had sacrificed her honor. This tale an impartial judge must reject. It is unsupported by proof. The earliest authority for it is a poem written by Pomfret. The respectable historians of that age, while they speak with just severity of the crimes of Kirke, either omit all mention of this most atrocious crime, or mention it as a thing rumored but not proved. Those who tell the story tell it with such variations as deprive it of all title to credit. Some lay the scene at Taunton, some at Exeter. Some make the heroine of the tale a maiden, some a married woman. The relation for whom the shameful ransom was paid is described by some as her father, by some as her brother, and by some as her husband. Lastly, the story is one which, long before Kirke was born, had been told of many other oppressors, and had become a favorite theme of novelists and dramatists. Two politicians of the fifteenth century, Rhynsault, the favorite of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and Oliver le Dain, the favorite of Lewis the Eleventh of France, had been accused of the same crime. Cintio had taken it for the subject of a romance. Whetstone had made out of Cintio's narrative the rude play of Promos and Cassandra; and Shakspeare had borrowed from Whetstone the plot of the noble tragic comedy of Measure for Measure. As Kirke was not the first, so he was not the last, to whom this excess of wickedness was popularly imputed. During the reaction which followed the Jacobin tyranny in France, a very similar charge was brought against Joseph Lebon, one of the most odious agents of the Committee of Public Safety, and, after inquiry, was admitted even by his prosecutors to be unfounded⁶.

The government was dissatisfied with Kirke, not on account of the barbarity with which he had treated his needy prisoners, but on account of the interested lenity which he had shown to rich delinquents⁷. He was soon recalled from the West. A less irregular and more cruel massacre was about to be perpetrated. The vengeance was deferred during some weeks. It was thought desirable that the Western Circuit should not begin till the other circuits had terminated. In the meantime the jails of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire were filled with thousands of captives. The chief friend and protector of these unhappy men in their extremity was one who abhorred their religious and political opinions, one whose order they hated, and to whom they had done unprovoked wrong, Bishop Ken. That good prelate used all his influence to soften the jailers, and retrenched from his own episcopal state that he might be able to make some addition to the coarse and scanty fare of those who had defaced his beloved Cathedral. His conduct on this occasion was of a piece with his whole life. His intellect was indeed darkened by many superstitions and prejudices: but his moral character, when impartially reviewed, sustains a comparison with any in ecclesiastical history, and seems to approach, as near as human infirmity permits, to the ideal perfection of Christian virtue⁸.

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1. London Gazette, August 3, 1685: The Battle of Sedgemoor a Farce. Return
2. Pepys's Diary, kept at Tangier; Historical Records of the Second or Queen's Royal Regiment of Foot. Return
3. Bloody Assizes; Burnet, i., 647; Luttrell's Diary, July 15, 1685; Locke's Western Rebellion; Toulmin's History of Taunton, edited by Savage. Return
4. Luttrell's Diary, July 15, 1685; Toulmin's Hist. of Taunton. Return
5. Oldmixon, 705; Life and Errors of John Dunton, Chap. vii. Return
6. The silence of Whig writers so credulous and so malevolent as Oldmixon and the compilers of the Western Martyrology would alone seem to me to settle the question. It also deserves to be remarked that the story of Rhynsault is told by Steele in the Spectator, No. 491. Surely it is hardly possible to believe that, if a crime exactly resembling that of Rhynsault had been committed within living memory in England by an officer of James the Second, Steele, who was indiscreetly and unseasonably forward to display his Whiggism, would have made no allusion to that fact. For the case of Lebon, see the Moniteur, 4 Messidor, l'an 3. Return
7. Sunderland to Kirke, July 14 and 28, 1685. "His Majesty," says Sunderland, "commands me to signify to you his dislike of these proceedings, and desires you to take care that no person concerned in the rebellion be at large." It is but just to add that, in the same letter, Kirke is blamed far allowing his soldiers to live at free quarter. Return
8. I should be very glad if I could give credit to the popular story that Ken, immediately after the battle of Sedgemoor, represented to the chiefs of the royal army the illegality of military executions. He would, I doubt not, have exerted all his influence on the side of law and of mercy, if he had been present. But there is no trustworthy evidence that he was then in the West at all. Indeed what we know about his proceedings at this time amounts very nearly to proof of an alibi. It is certain from the Journals of the House of Lords that, on the Thursday before the battle, he was at Westminster: it is equally certain that, on the Monday after the battle, he was with Monmouth in the Tower; and, in that age, a journey from London to Bridgewater and back again was no light thing. Return

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