Part 37

It would fill three or four of these pages to transcribe the titles and attributes of the Grand Signior, which he assumes in a letter to Henry IV. Selden, in his "Titles of Honour," first part, p. 140, has preserved them. This "emperor of victorious emperors," as he styles himself, at length condescended to agree with the emperor of Germany, in 1606, that in all their letters and instruments they should be only styled father and son: the emperor calling the sultan his son; and the sultan the emperor, in regard of his years, his father.

Formerly, says Houssaie, the title of highness was only given to kings; but now it has become so common that all the great houses assume it. All the great, says a modern, are desirous of being confounded with princes, and are ready to seize on the privileges of royal dignity. We have already come to highness. The pride of our descendants, I suspect, will usurp that of majesty.

Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and his queen Isabella of Castile, were only treated with the title of highness. Charles was the first who took that of majesty: not in his quality of king of Spain, but as emperor. St. Foix informs us, that kings were usually addressed by the titles of most illustrious, or your serenity, or your grace; but that the custom of giving them that of majesty was only established by Louis XI., a prince the least majestic in all his actions, his manners, and his exterior--a severe monarch, but no ordinary man, the Tiberius of France. The manners of this monarch were most sordid; in public audiences he dressed like the meanest of the people, and affected to sit on an old broken chair, with a filthy dog on his knees. In an account found of his household, this majestic prince has a charge made him for two new sleeves sewed on one of his old doublets.

Formerly kings were apostrophised by the title of your grace. Henry VIII. was the first, says Houssaie, who assumed the title of highness; and at length majesty. It was Francis I. who saluted him with this last title, in their interview in the year 1520, though he called himself only the first gentleman in his kingdom!

So distinct were once the titles of highness and excellence, that when Don Juan, the brother of Philip II., was permitted to take up the latter title, and the city of Granada saluted him by the title of highness, it occasioned such serious jealousy at court, that had he persisted in it, he would have been condemned for treason.

The usual title of cardinals, about 1600, was seignoria illustrissima; the Duke of Lerma, the Spanish minister and cardinal, in his old age, assumed the title of eccellencia reverendissima. The church of Rome was in its glory, and to be called reverend was then accounted a higher honour than to be styled illustrious. But by use illustrious grew familiar, and reverend vulgar, and at last the cardinals were distinguished by the title of eminent.

After all these historical notices respecting these titles, the reader will smile when he is acquainted with the reason of an honest curate of Montferrat, who refused to bestow the title of highness on the duke of Mantua, because he found in his breviary these words, Tu solus Dominus, tu solus Altissimus; from all which he concluded, that none but the Lord was to be honoured with the title of highness! The "Titles of Honour" of Selden is a very curious volume, and, as the learned Usher told Evelyn, the most valuable work of this great scholar. The best edition is a folio of about one thousand pages. Selden vindicates the right of a king of England to the title of emperor.

"And never yet was TITLE did not move; And never eke a mind, that TITLE did not love."

TITLES OF SOVEREIGNS.

In countries where despotism exists in all its force, and is gratified in all its caprices, either the intoxication of power has occasioned sovereigns to assume the most solemn and the most fantastic titles; or the royal duties and functions were considered of so high and extensive a nature, that the people expressed their notion of the pure monarchical state by the most energetic descriptions of oriental fancy.

The chiefs of the Natchez are regarded by their people as the children of the sun, and they bear the name of their father.

The titles which some chiefs assume are not always honourable in themselves; it is sufficient if the people respect them. The king of Quiterva calls himself the great lion; and for this reason lions are there so much respected, that they are not allowed to kill them, but at certain royal huntings.

The king of Monomotapa is surrounded by musicians and poets, who adulate him by such refined flatteries as lord of the sun and moon; great magician; and great thief!--where probably thievery is merely a term for dexterity.

The Asiatics have bestowed what to us appear as ridiculous titles of honour on their princes. The king of Arracan assumes the following ones: "Emperor of Arracan, possessor of the white elephant, and the two ear-rings, and in virtue of this possession legitimate heir of Pegu and Brama; lord of the twelve provinces of Bengal, and the twelve kings who place their heads under his feet."

His majesty of Ava is called God: when he writes to a foreign sovereign he calls himself the king of kings, whom all others should obey, as he is the cause of the preservation of all animals; the regulator of the seasons, the absolute master of the ebb and flow of the sea, brother to the sun, and king of the four-and-twenty umbrellas! These umbrellas are always carried before him as a mark of his dignity.

The titles of the kings of Achem are singular, though voluminous. The most striking ones are sovereign of the universe, whose body is luminous as the sun; whom God created to be as accomplished as the moon at her plenitude; whose eye glitters like the northern star; a king as spiritual as a ball is round; who when he rises shades all his people; from under whose feet a sweet odour is wafted, &c. &c.

The Kandyan sovereign is called Dewo (God). In a deed of gift he proclaims his extraordinary attributes. "The protector of religion, whose fame is infinite, and of surpassing excellence, exceeding the moon, the unexpanded jessamine buds, the stars, &c.; whose feet are as fragrant to the noses of other kings as flowers to bees; our most noble patron and god by custom," &c.

After a long enumeration of the countries possessed by the king of Persia, they give him some poetical distinctions: the branch of honour; the mirror of virtue; and the rose of delight.

ROYAL DIVINITIES.

There is a curious dissertation in the "Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres," by the Abbé Mongault, "on the divine honours which were paid to the governors of provinces during the Roman republic;" in their lifetime these originally began in gratitude, and at length degenerated into flattery. These facts curiously show how far the human mind can advance, when led on by customs that operate unperceivably on it, and blind us in our absurdities. One of these ceremonies was exquisitely ludicrous. When they voted a statue to a proconsul, they placed it among the statues of the gods in the festival called Lectisternium, from the ridiculous circumstances of this solemn festival. On that day the gods were invited to a repast, which was however spread in various quarters of the city, to satiate mouths more mortal. The gods were however taken down from their pedestals, laid on beds ornamented in their temples; pillows were placed under their marble heads; and while they reposed in this easy posture they were served with a magnificent repast. When Cæsar had conquered Rome, the servile senate put him to dine with the gods! Fatigued by and ashamed of these honours, he desired the senate to erase from his statue in the capitol the title they had given him of a demi-god!

The adulations lavished on the first Roman emperors were extravagant; but perhaps few know that they were less offensive than the flatterers of the third century under the Pagan, and of the fourth under the Christian emperors. Those who are acquainted with the character of the age of Augustulus have only to look at the one, and the other code, to find an infinite number of passages which had not been tolerable even in that age. For instance, here is a law of Arcadius and Honorius, published in 404:--

"Let the officers of the palace be warned to abstain from frequenting tumultuous meetings; and that those who, instigated by a sacrilegious temerity, dare to oppose the authority of our divinity, shall be deprived of their employments, and their estates confiscated." The letters they write are holy. When the sons speak of their fathers, it is, "Their father of divine memory;" or "Their divine father." They call their own laws oracles, and celestial oracles. So also their subjects address them by the titles of "Your Perpetuity, your Eternity." And it appears by a law of Theodoric the Great, that the emperors at length added this to their titles. It begins, "If any magistrate, after having concluded a public work, put his name rather than that of Our Perpetuity, let him be judged guilty of high-treason." All this reminds one of "the celestial empire" of the Chinese.

Whenever the Great Mogul made an observation, Bernier tells us that some of the first Omrahs lifted up their hands, crying, "Wonder! wonder! wonder!" And a proverb current in his dominion was, "If the king saith at noonday it is night, you are to say, Behold the moon and the stars!" Such adulation, however, could not alter the general condition and fortune of this unhappy being, who became a sovereign without knowing what it is to be one. He was brought out of the seraglio to be placed on the throne, and it was he, rather than the spectators, who might have truly used the interjection of astonishment!

DETHRONED MONARCHS

Fortune never appears in a more extravagant humour than when she reduces monarchs to become mendicants. Half a century ago it was not imagined that our own times should have to record many such instances. After having contemplated kings raised into divinities, we see them now depressed as beggars. Our own times, in two opposite senses, may emphatically be distinguished as the age of kings.

In Candide, or the Optimist, there is an admirable stroke of Voltaire's. Eight travellers meet in an obscure inn, and some of them with not sufficient money to pay for a scurvy dinner. In the course of conversation, they are discovered to be eight monarchs in Europe, who had been deprived of their crowns!

What added to this exquisite satire was, that there were eight living monarchs at that moment wanderers on the earth;--a circumstance which has since occurred!

Adelaide, the widow of Lothario, king of Italy, one of the most beautiful women in her age, was besieged in Pavia by Berenger, who resolved to constrain her to marry his son after Pavia was taken; she escaped from her prison with her almoner. The archbishop of Reggio had offered her an asylum: to reach it, she and her almoner travelled on foot through the country by night, concealing herself in the day-time among the corn, while the almoner begged for alms and food through the villages.