BOOK SECOND.
Chapter 1.
THE THREE DUKES OF SCHOMBERG.
I. Frederick Armand, First Duke of Schomberg.
“Le Maréchal de Schomberg dans l’armée, l’Amiral Duquesne dans la marine, et le Marquis de Ruvigny dans la diplomatic, la Revocation de l’Edit de Nantes (sans parler de ses conséquences génerales) coûta à la France et au Roi ces trois excellents et glorieux serviteurs.” — Guizot.
Frederic Armand de Schomberg was by birth a German Count, a scion of a noble house of the Palatinate. His mother was an English lady, and when he was but a boy, he became a citizen of the world. By his talents he learned to be a good Frenchman, and by his habits he ripened into a grand and unrepining exile, and a model British subject and soldier.
He was born in 1615, being the son of John Mainhardt de Schomberg, Comte de Schomberg, by his wife the Honourable Anne Sutton, daughter of the Right Honourable Edward Sutton, ninth Baron Dudley of Dudley Castle, Worcestershire, and of Theodosia, Lady Dudley, who was a daughter of Sir James Harrington. Count John, Grand-Marshal of the Palatinate of the Rhine, was the negotiator of the marriage of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, with Princess Elizabeth of England, in 1612. “The Letters of George Lord Carew (1615-17),” printed by the Camden Society, prove that our hero’s father, John Mainhardt, Comte de Schomberg, married, in 1615, Anne (daughter of Lord Dudley), who in December of the same year died in childbed, having given birth to Frederic Armand. Lord Carew writes in August 1616, Monsieur Schomberge, husband to my wife [a term of endearment] Anne Dudleye is dead.” Thus Frederic was left an orphan;[1] and thus he became a protegé of the Elector and Electress; he was an infantine member of their short-lived court at Prague. He was conveyed into Holland in the suite of the ex-king and queen of Bohemia.
He thus became a denizen of Holland, where four trustees were appointed for his education. The profession of a soldier would be early suggested to him by his august and chivalrous patron Maurice, Prince of Orange, and by Maurice’s half-brother, Prince Henry Frederick, who was a grandson of the heroic Coligny. Under such protection, and with the remembrance of the wrongs inflicted on his own Prince by the Roman Catholic League, young Schomberg was prepared to fight with his whole heart in the great Protestant confederation.
At the date of his first recorded appearance in arms (the nineteenth year of his age) France was engaged in the Anti-Imperialist cause, in spite of its Protestantism. This was at the battle of Nordlingen, in September 1634, where, however, he was not on the winning side, for the Imperialists gained the day. He had some pleasing experience of the French as comrades in war, which was the basis of his employments as a naturalized Frenchman in after years. He served during the remainder of the thirty years’ war. According to the Biographie Universelle, he was before Dole as a captain in Marshal Ratzau’s regiment. By that marshal he was detached to surprise Nordhausen. He put the advance guard to flight, ran a race with them to one of the gates, pursuers and fugitives reached the goal en masse, and threw themselves pell mell into the town.
Holland continued to be his adopted country. In 1647 he lost his princely
- ↑ The true dates of his mother’s and father’s deaths expose the wrong habit of historians of old in concocting history out of conjectures and probabilities. The received opinion was that Anne, Countess of Schomberg, accompanied the Elector and Electress into Holland as a widow, and that her husband had just been killed at the Battle of Prague, the only fight that the Elector made for the throne of Bohemia. This opinion is demolished by the facts, and along with it the fine sentence written by Miss Benger (“Memoirs of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia,” vol. ii., page 93. London, 1825):— “Of the ladies, Elizabeth alone retained self-possession; her bosom friend Anne Dudley was overwhelmed with the fate of her husband who had fallen in the fatal conflict” [the Battle of Prague].
