Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

shapes are not quite alike; and furthermore, at Vienna the beak, claws, and tongue are gilt, while at Petersburg they are red.

The Prussian eagle is now the only unchanged descendant of the original Roman emblem. Prussia, however, did not get it as an imperial token, as Austria and Russia pretend to hold it; she obtained it simply by absorption from the Teutonic order, which received it from Frederick II., who, as a testimony of his admiration of the fighting qualities of the brotherhood, permitted it to bear his arms. But in the Emperor Frederick's time, as we have just seen, the German eagle had but a single head: it was in that form, therefore, that the order took it; so that, when Sigismund altered the imperial bird by making it look left as well as right, the original single beak remained, thenceforth, the sole property of the Teutonic knights. It passed on, with their black and white, to the Duchy of Prussia, when Albert of Brandenburg, the last Grand-Master, turned Protestant, and profited by the opportunity to convert the dominions of the order into a property for himself. In 1618 the Duchy was conveyed by marriage to the electoral branch of Brandenburg, which thus acquired the Black Eagle and the Teutonic colours. The Brandenburg eagle, as it is now called though, as this story shows, the name is a total error-has golden claws and beak, and a red tongue; and it is the only one of the three eagles which we are here describing which is employed on the ordinary flags of the country to which it belongs. It is perhaps the oldest emblem which exists-not, of course, in its Prussian sense and use, but in its history and origin; for it goes straight back, possibly without a change of shape or colour, to the Crusades, and thence on again to

Rome. Even the Spanish arms, which are undoubtedly very ancient, cannot show such an antiquity as this. Their red and yellow, which are carried upon the flag as well, come from the old shields of Castille and Arragon, both of which bore gules and or; while the castle and the lion of Castille and Leon are perhaps the earliest examples of what we call "canting arms," and the French armes parlantes. All this dates probably from the beginning of the 13th century, and has remained unaltered since. As for the reason of it, Ocampo tells us that Alphonso the Noble, King of Castille, adopted in 1212 a castle for his arms, in memory of the Castle of Ferrail, which he took from the Moors. Legend says, too, that the Count of Barcelona, who became King of Arragon, took the four red bars, because, on a battlefield, Charles the Bald of France laid four blood-stained fingers on his golden shield.

Our own lions formed, as leopards, the arms of Normandy, and were imported by the Conqueror. There were, however, only two of them in his time, and there is doubt as to when the third was added; some authors arguing that it was put on by Henry II., others, that Richard Coeur de Lion gave it to us, and that he simultaneously changed the leopards into lions. The origin of the white cross of Savoy is unknown: the story which explained it by the presence of Amadeus the Fifth at the siege of Rhodes, and by his consequent supposed adoption of the badge of the Hospitallers, is discredited by all modern historians; for the double reason that Amadeus never went to Rhodes, and that the house of Savoy bore the white cross long before the siege took place. The quintuple red cross of Jerusalem, forming what French heralds call a croix recroisetée,

which is now worn as the star of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, has a clearer source; Godefroy de Bouillon assumed it as his mark when he was proclaimed King of the Holy City in 1099. The red shield and silver cross of Switzerland came from Schwytz, which gave not only its name but its emblem to the Confederation on its foundation in 1315. The men of Schwytz had either kept the cross in memory of the Crusades, or, as Justinger asserts, had received it specially from the emperor during a raid they made in Burgundy. Of the four Austrian colours, the black and yellow represent the Empire, or rather the sable of the eagle and the golden shield; while the red and white are the old Austrian colours proper, as distinguished from those of Hapsburg and Lorraine. It should, however, be observed, that there is a legend which explains the black and yellow in another way it is pretended that Frederick Barbarossa noticed one day at a ceremony at Mayence that the flooring of the hall was painted black and gold, admired the combination, and declared that he adopted it as the imperial badge.

And so, if it were not wearisome, we might go on for half an hour. It will, however, be more amusing to abandon both history and legend for a few seconds, and to quote a little from the imagination of an enthusiast. Here is an extract from the opinions of Père Anselme, who wrote in 1663 he explains the origin of arms without much care for fact, but he is very rich in sentiment. He tells us that "the Kings of Scotland, Bohemia, Leon, and Norway bear lions in their arms in order to indicate the nobility of their anger. The Kings of Sweden and Media bear crowns and diadems to express their power. England and Denmark have

leopards, as a sign of the variety of their warlike passions. The hearts which appear on the shield of Denmark represent the love of the people for the prince. The Ottomans have taken crescents, as a symbol of the ambition of their conquests. The King of India has bezants, to show that he possesses mines of gold and silver; and the King of Cathay has taken heads of Moors, in order to astonish foreigners." This is ingenious, and it really is a pity that it is not true, for national coats of arms would become infinitely more interesting if we could but attribute their birth to such essentially moral causes as the Père Anselme enumerates. His explanation of the crescent is not more remarkable than his other statements; but it is the only one which it is worth while to notice, for the reason that actual popular opinion agrees with his idea that the crescent really is a purely Ottoman symbol. This is wrong. The crescent was the special mark of Constantinople; it lasted there for centuries, as a local and thoroughly Christian emblem. The Turks found it there, and adopted it; but they no more invented it than Prussia invented the Black Eagle. Even now, at Moscow, and in other Russian towns, the crescent is to be seen on churches with the cross above it, the object of their union being to signify the Byzantine origin of the Russian faith. The antithesis of the Crescent and the Cross is therefore altogether an illusion; there is no original hostility between them: the supposed contrast of their meanings has grown up by habit during the last four hundred years, but it has no foundation in the genealogy of the crescent.

Some subjects have borne arms which were grander than those of the sovereign who bestowed them. What could be more superb, for in

stance, than the shield which Ferdinand granted to Columbus-the arms of Castille and Leon, and a blue sea with silver islands, with the motto, "Por Castilla y por Leon nuevo mundo Hallo Colomb"! The Chateaubriands bear the fleur-delys, which was given to them by St Louis, with the magnificent device, "Mon sang teint les bannières de France." The Montmorencys, too, have a brilliant coat: they changed their white cross into a red one in memory of the blood shed by Matthieu the First at the battle of Bouvines, and added sixteen gold eaglets in memory of the sixteen flags he took on the same occasion. Blazonries like these serve as veritable marks in history: it is true that they are not international in their character or effect; but although they are only personal attributes, they possess a grandeur which entitles them to be mentioned amongst the symbols of the countries to which their bearers have belonged.

From arms we get to badges, which may be taken to include scarfs, liveries, uniforms, cockades, and all other analogous distinctive tokens. Even "Sublime Porte" may be regarded as a badge, though it has ceased to be a material object, and exists now only as a name. When it was an object, it was a very curious one. Mostadhem, the last Caliph of the Abassides, put a piece of the famous black stone of Mecca into the gate of his palace at Bagdad (it is worth observing that, according to true believers, this stone was white at first, but turned black from the influence of the sins of men). The gate consequently became a shrine of veneration, and, by degrees, the entire palace, regarded as the seat of authority, came to be known under the name of its "Sublime Gate." Other Governments than that of Turkey have

been similarly designated by the appellation of the sovereign's residence; the Courts of the Tuileries, of St James's, of the Escurial, were examples of them. State seals form another class of badge; but symbols of all these descriptions strike us much less than the ordinary visible signs amongst which we live. Of these latter, uniforms are perhaps the most conspicuous; but they are so well known, and are such a matter of mere tailoring, that it would be a waste of time to say anything here about them, although they do aid to constitute a prodigious mass of individual vanity. Liveries have ceased to be brilliant or universal, but they were the starting-point of uniforms, and are interesting as historic emblems. Unfortunately they have been so perpetually changed, that they have no longer any symbolic value; in their actual state they represent nothing but the nineteenth-century idea of servants' dress, and have altogether lost their original party significance. Clan tartans are now the only remaining example of the old use of liveries, of the time when all the members and retainers of great families wore the colours of their chief. Cockades, again, though they still generally preserve in European countries a distinctive aspect of nationality, have similarly changed their meaning. They continue, it is true, to be worn in certain Continental armies; but they too are generally regarded as a mere detail of servants' clothes. And yet they have a special place in history; for just as liveries were replaced by scarves in battle, so scarves were replaced again by cockades, in order to help to distinguish hostile armies during the infancy of uniforms. They first appeared in the early part of the seventeenth century, when a few of them were worn in France; but the tuft of grass which

Marlborough put upon his soldiers' hats was the earliest military cockade which was employed on a large scale; for though cockades continued to be worn occasionally as a party mark from the commencement of the eighteenth century, it does not appear that they became general in European armies until the war of the Austrian succession (1740-1748). At that time they were knots of ribbon; sometimes, even, they were bunches of paper; and they were not invariably of the national colour, for the French cockade appears to have been white and green in 1756, and not to have become pure white, by royal ordinance, till 1767. From this latter date cockades became universal; but a writer in the 'Conversations Lexicon' asserts that they did not really take root in Germany until 1813, when, in addition to the separate cockade adopted by each country, the so-called national cockade of Germany-black, red, and gold was first invented. This badge, which was essentially political, was prohibited by the Diet in 1832; but it came up again in 1848, when it was worn even by the army. It died out in 1850. The wearing of cockades by nobody but the servants of persons who hold the Sovereign's commission is a purely British practice; throughout the Continent, the rule (if indeed there be any rule at all) is that the national cockade is borne only by the servants of great dignitaries; but our black Hanoverian cockade (luckily it is not English) has been appropriated by almost everybody in France during the last twenty years, and is coming into use elsewhere as a natural ornament of a footman's hat, without the slightest reference to the master's place in life. After all, this does not matter much, for the whole principle of badges is vanishing

[ocr errors]

from our manners and our customs. We are a long way now from the paper cross of St Bartholomew, from the corn-stalks of the Mazarinists during the Fronde, from the two parties of the Caps and Hats in the Swedish Diet in 1788, from the scarfs of the Armagnacs, and the cross of the Burgundians. All these marks were evidences of a way of life which seems to have disappeared; and even if similar causes were to occur again, it is scarcely likely that badges would be revived by them. In the days of badges there were no policemen, and standing armies had not grown into normal institutions; soldiers and policemen wear badges for us now, so the public does without them, except when its small vanities are satisfied by maintaining them.

The shape of armorial shields is another means of indicating nationality. Nearly every great people has its own special form of écusson for men, but all nations have agreed in assigning lozenges to women; the reason being, according to the Legitimists of France, that, as the Gospel says of lilies that "they toil not, neither do they spin," and as spinning is a special attribute of women, it follows not only that the wearer of the lilies cannot be a woman, but also, that women should bear arms in a shield shaped like a distaff. The first of these two conclusions is not exactly logical, for the Salic law is certainly more ancient than the French lilies; but it supplies an excellent and diverting example of the facility with which words, facts, or figures, whatever be their nature, can be made to serve a special cause. The second argument is still more droll, for its result is to deduce female heraldry from the teaching of the Bible; we need not go back quite so far, and can con

tent ourselves with the explanation that lozenges represent a distaff, because that instrument was the special attribute of women in the early feudal times when arms were first invented.

Mottoes, particularly when they assume a special form, like the F.E.R.T. of Savoy, or the A.E.I.O.U. of Austria, must certainly be classed amongst the lesser emblems of nations. No one knows what the former example means, for the old interpretation, "Fortitudo ejus Rhodum tenuit," is now abandoned; but the latter may be done freely into English by "Austria's Empire Is Over Universe." France has never possessed a national device, though her kings have borne a variety of personal mottoes, of which the "Nec pluribus impar" of Louis XIV. was the latest. And England is in an analogous position, for "Dieu et mon droit" is purely royal, and belongs in no way to the country. The Prussians, on the contrary, have a really national phrase in "Mitt Gott fur Koenig und Vaterland;" but even that dates only from the great rising in 1813. It may be said that to some small extent mottoes replaced war-cries, when the latter were driven out by gunpowder; for it was not till eager people could no longer shout their sentiments that they began to write or print them. And yet scarcely any battle-cries were really national; excepting, perhaps, St George for England, and Santiago for Spain: nearly all the others were personal to each chieftain and his men. For example, the Duke of Lorraine cried, "Lorraine au riche duc;" the men of Hainaut, "Hainaut au noble Comte;" the Auvergnats, "Clermont au Dauphin d'Auvergne;" the Coucys cried, "Coucy à la merveille;" the Venetians, "Marco, Marco;" the Normands, "Rouen;" the Gascons, "Bordeaux;" the

VOL. CXV.-NO. DCCIII.

Flemings, "Ghent ;" and we all know who cried "Douglas, Douglas." In Lorraine there was a custom of the strangest kind; all gentlemen who carried in their arms a cross cried "Prény;" all who bore a bar cried "Čouvert;" and all who had rings cried "Loupy." Of all the innumerable shouts which history and tradition have handed down to us, there was but one, or rather two at once, which made a real mark - the double cry of the fight at Weinsberg in 1140, the cry which gave their names to Guelph and Ghibelline, "Hie Waiblingen"-"Hie Welf." And yet, notwithstanding their want of influence on history, war - cries have a sort of literature of their own; they have been written about, and have been divided, like other subjects, into categories. There were cries of invocation, like "Dieu aide," "Notre Dame," or 66 Montjoie ;" cries of resolution, like the "Dieu le veut" of the Crusaders; cries of exhortation, like "A la rescousse, Montoison," and "Au plus dru;' cries of defiance, like the arrogant exclamation, "Place à la bannière;" and cries of terror, like "Au feu" or "Chevaliers peuvent." Whether the modern "Hoch" and the ancient "Hurrah are still to be considered as war-cries is a matter of individual opinion; but when the Germans evacuated Paris on that bright March morning three years ago, and, in the intoxication of abundant victory, madly roared out those two echoing words as they passed beneath the Arch of Triumph, it certainly did seem to the half-dozen lookers-on that the fierce shout from those forty thousand throats well deserved the name of Kriegsgeschrei. If so, war-cries still continue to form part of the vanities of nations in their most aggressive and defiant form.

2 s

"

« ПредишнаНапред »