1848 he held the Tuileries long enough to cover the king’s retreat, but refrained from initiating active measures against the mob. He followed his sister-in-law, the duchess of Orléans, and her two sons to the chamber of deputies, but was separated from them by the rioters, and only escaped finally by disguising himself in the uniform of a national guard. He embarked for England, where he settled with his parents at Claremont. His chief aim during his exile, especially after his father’s death, was a reconciliation between the two branches of the house of Bourbon, as indispensable to the re-establishment of the French monarchy in any form. These wishes were frustrated on the one hand by the attitude of the comte de Chambord, and on the other by the determination of the duchess of Orléans to maintain the pretensions of the count of Paris. Nemours was prepared to go further than the other princes of his family in accepting the principles of the legitimists, but lengthy negotiations ended in 1857 with a letter, written by Nemours, as he subsequently explained, at the dictation of his brother, François, prince de Joinville, in which he insisted that Chambord should express his adherence to the tricolour flag and to the principles of constitutional government. In 1871 the Orleans princes renewed their professions of allegiance to the senior branch of their house, but they were not consulted when the count of Chambord came to Paris in 1873, and their political differences remained until his death in 1883.
Nemours had lived at Bushey House after the death of Queen Marie Amélie in 1866. In 1871 the exile imposed on the French princes was withdrawn, but he only transferred his establishment to Paris after their disabilities were also removed. In March 1872 he was restored to his rank in the army as general of division, and placed in the first section of the general staff. After his retirement from the active list he continued to act as president of the Red Cross Society until 1881, when new decrees against the, princes of the blood led to his withdrawal from Parisian society. During the presidency of Marshal MacMahon, he had appeared from time to time at the Élysée. He died at Versailles on the 26th of June 1896, the duchess having died at Claremont on the 10th of November 1857. Their children were Louis Philippe Marie Ferdinand Gaston, comte d’Eu (b. 1842), who married Isabella, eldest daughter of Don Pedro II. of Brazil; Ferdinand Philippe Marie, duc d’Alençon (b. 1844), who married Sophie of Bavaria (1847–1897), sister of the empress Elizabeth of Austria; Margaret (1846–1893), who married Prince Ladislas Czartoryski; and Blanche (b. 1857).
See R. Bazin, Le Duc de Nemours (1907); Paul Thureau-Dangin, Histoire de la monarchie de juillet (4 vols., 1884, &c.).
NEMOURS, a town of northern France, in the department of
Seine-et-Marne, on the Loing and its canal, 26 m. S. of Melun,
on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) 4814. The church,
which dates mainly from the 16th century, has a handsome
wooden spire, and there is a feudal castle. A statue of the
mathematician Bézout (d. 1783), a native of the town, was erected
in 1885. In the vicinity is a group of fine sandstone rocks, and
sand is extensively quarried. Nemours is supposed to derive its name from the woods (nemora) in the midst of which it formerly
stood, and discoveries of Gallo-Roman remains indicate its early
origin. It was captured by the English in 1420, but derives its
historical importance rather from the lordship (afterwards
duchy) to which it gave its name. In 1585 a treaty revoking
previous concessions to the Protestants was concluded at Nemours
between Catherine de Medici and the Guises.
NENADOVICH, MATEYA (1777–1854), Servian patriot, was born in 1777. He is generally called Prota Mateya, since as a boy of sixteen he was made a priest, and a few years later became archpriest (Prota) of Valyevo. His father, Alexa Nenadovich, Knez (chief magistrate) of the district of Valyevo, was one of the most popular and respected public men among the Servians at the beginning of the 19th century. When the four leaders of the Janissaries of the Belgrade Pashalic (the so-called Dahis)
thought that the only way to prevent a general rising of the
Servians was to intimidate them by murdering all their principal
men, Alexa Nenadovich was one of the first victims. The
policy of the Dahis, instead of preventing, did actually and
immediately provoke a general insurrection of the Servians
against the Turks. Prota Mateya became the deputy-commander
of the insurgents of the Valyevo district (1804), but did not
hold the post for long, as Karageorge sent him in 1805 on a secret
mission to St Petersburg, and afterwards employed him almost
constantly as Servia’s diplomatic envoy to Russia, Austria,
Bucharest and Constantinople. After the fall of Karageorge
(1813), the new leader of the Servians, Milosh Obrenovich, sent
Prota Mateya as representative of Servia to the Congress of
Vienna (1814–1815), where he pleaded the Servian cause indefatigably.
During that mission he often saw Lord Castlereagh,
and for the first time the Servian national interests were brought
to the knowledge of British statesmen.
Prota Mateya’s memoirs are the most valuable authority for the history of the first and second Servian insurrections against the Turks. The best edition of the Memoari Proṭe Mateye Nenadovicha was published by the Servian Literary Association in Belgrade in 1893.
NENAGH, a market town of Co. Tipperary, Ireland, finely
situated in a rich though hilly country near the river Nenagh,
9612 m. S.W. from Dublin by the Ballybrophy. and Limerick
branch of the Great Southern & Western railway. Pop. (1901)
4704. Of the old castle, called Nenagh Round, dating from the
time of King John, there still exists the circular donjon or keep.
There are no remains of the hospital founded in 1200 for Austin
canons, nor of the Franciscan friary, founded in the reign of
Henry III. and one of the richest religious houses in Ireland. The
town is governed by an urban district council. It was one of the
ancient manors of the Butlers, who received for it the grant of a
fair from Henry VIII. In 1550 the town and friary were burned
by O’Carroll. In 1641 the town was taken by Owen Roe O’Neill,
but shortly afterwards it was recaptured by Lord Inchiquin.
It surrendered to Ireton in 1651, and was burned by Sarsfield in
1688.
NENNIUS (fl. 796), a Welsh writer to whom we owe the
Historia Britonum, lived and wrote in Brecknock or Radnor.
His work is known to us through thirty manuscripts; but the
earliest of these cannot be dated much earlier than the year 1000;
and all are defaced by interpolations which give to the work so
confused a character that critics were long disposed to treat it
as an unskilful forgery. A new turn was given to the controversy
by Heinrich Zimmer, who, in his Nennius vindicatus (1893),
traced the history of the work and, by a comparison of the
manuscripts with the 11th-century translation of the Irish
scholar, Gilla Coemgim (d. 1072), succeeded in stripping off the
later accretions from the original nucleus of the Historia. Zimmer
follows previous critics in rejecting the Prologus maior (§§ 1, 2),
the Capitula, or table of contents, and part of the Mirabilia
which form the concluding section. But he proves that Nennius
should be regarded as the compiler of the Historia proper (§§ 7-65).
Zimmer’s conclusions are of more interest to literary critics than
to historians. The only part of the Historia which deserves to
be treated as a historical document is the section known as the
Genealogiae Saxonum (§§ 57-65). This is merely a recension of
a work which was composed about 679 by a Briton of Strathclyde.
The author’s name is unknown; but he is, after Gildas, our
earliest authority for the facts of the English conquest of England.
Nennius himself gives us the oldest legends relating to the
victories of King Arthur; the value of the Historia from this
point of view is admitted by the severest critics. The chief
authorities whom Nennius followed were Gildas’ De excidio
Britonum, Eusebius, the Vita Patricii of Murichu Maccu Machtheni,
the Collectanea of Tirechan, the Liber occupationis (an
Irish work on the settlement of Ireland), the Liber de sex
aetatibus mundi, the chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine, the
Liber beati Germani. The sources from which he derived his
notices of King Arthur (§ 56) have not been determined.
See J. Stevenson’s edition of the Historia Britonum (English Hist. Soc., 1838), based on a careful study of the MSS.; A. de la Borderie, L’Historia Britonum (Paris and London, 1883), which summarizes the older negative criticism; H. Zimmer, Nennius vindicatus (Berlin, 1893): T. Mommsen in Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, xix. 283. (H. W. C. D.)