[1] This, at least, is the account given by Catholic authorities.
Less favourable is the view taken by non-Catholic historians, which
seems in some measure to be confirmed by St Francis himself.
According to this, Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, who succeeded his
more tolerant father in 1580, was determined to reduce the Chablais
to the Catholic religion, by peaceful means if possible, by force if
necessary. After two years of preaching Francis wrote to the duke
(_Oeuvres compl._ ii. p. 551): "During 27 months I have scattered the
seed of the Word of God in this miserable land; shall I say among
thorns or on stony ground? Certainly, save for the conversion of the
seigneur d'Avully and the advocate Poncet, I have little to boast
of." In the winter of 1596-1597 Francis was at Turin, and at his
suggestion the duke decided on a regular plan for the coercion of the
refractory Protestants. This plan anticipated that employed later by
Louis XIV. against the Huguenots in France. The Calvinist ministers
were expelled; Protestant books were confiscated and destroyed; the
acts of Protestant lawyers and officials were declared invalid. The
country was flooded with Jesuits and friars, whose arguments were
reinforced by quartering troops, veterans of the Indian wars in
Mexico, on the refractory inhabitants. Those whose stubborn
persistence in error survived all these inducements to repent were
sent into exile. See the article "Franz von Sales" by J. Ehni in
Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopaedie_ (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1899).
(W. A. P.)
[2] With the title of Nicopolis _in partibus_.--ED.
FRANCIS, SIR PHILIP (1740-1818), English politician and pamphleteer, the
supposed author of the _Letters of Junius_, and the chief antagonist of
Warren Hastings, was born in Dublin on the 22nd of October 1740. He was
the only son of Dr Philip Francis (c. 1708-1773), a man of some literary
celebrity in his time, known by his translations of Horace, Aeschines
and Demosthenes. He received the rudiments of an excellent education at
a free school in Dublin, and afterwards spent a year or two (1751-1752)
under his father's roof at Skeyton rectory, Norfolk, and elsewhere, and
for a short time he had Gibbon as a fellow-pupil. In March 1753 he
entered St Paul's school, London, where he remained for three years and
a half, becoming a proficient classical scholar. In 1756, immediately on
his leaving school, he was appointed to a junior clerkship in the
secretary of state's office by Henry Fox (afterwards Lord Holland), with
whose family Dr Francis was at that time on intimate terms; and this
post he retained under the succeeding administration. In 1758 he was
employed as secretary to General Bligh in the expedition against
Cherbourg; and in the same capacity he accompanied the earl of Kinnoul
on his special embassy to the court of Portugal in 1760.
In 1761 he became personally known to Pitt, who, recognizing his ability
and discretion, once and again made use of his services as private
amanuensis. In 1762 he was appointed to a principal clerkship in the war
office, where he formed an intimate friendship with Christopher D'Oyly,
the secretary of state's deputy, whose dismissal from office in 1772 was
hotly resented by "Junius"; and in the same year he married Miss
Macrabie, the daughter of a retired London merchant. His official duties
brought him into direct relations with many who were well versed in the
politics of the time. In 1763 the great constitutional questions arising
out of the arrest of Wilkes began to be sharply canvassed. It was
natural that Francis, who from a very early age had been in the habit of
writing occasionally to the newspapers, should be eager to take an
active part in the discussion, though his position as a government
official made it necessary that his intervention should be carefully
disguised. He is known to have written to the _Public Ledger_ and
_Public Advertiser_, as an advocate of the popular cause, on many
occasions about and after the year 1763; he frequently attended debates
in both Houses of Parliament, especially when American questions were
being discussed; and between 1769 and 1771 he is also known to have been
favourable to the scheme for the overthrow of the Grafton government and
afterwards of that of Lord North, and for persuading or forcing Lord
Chatham into power. In January 1769 the first of the _Letters of Junius_
appeared, and the series was continued till January 21, 1772. They had
been preceded by others under various signatures such as, "Candor,"
"Father of Candor," "Anti-Sejanus," "Lucius," "Nemesis," which have all
been attributed, some of them certainly in error, to one and the same
hand. The authorship of the _Letters of Junius_ has been assigned to
Francis on a variety of grounds (see JUNIUS).
In March 1772 Francis finally left the war office, and in July of the
same year he left England for a tour through France, Germany and Italy,
which lasted until the following December. On his return he was
contemplating emigration to New England, when in June 1773 Lord North,
on the recommendation of Lord Barrington, appointed him a member of the
newly constituted supreme council of Bengal at a salary of L10,000 per
annum. Along with his colleagues Monson and Clavering he reached
Calcutta in October 1774, and a long struggle with Warren Hastings, the
governor-general, immediately began. These three, actuated probably by
petty personal motives, combined to form a majority of the council in
harassing opposition to the governor-general's policy; and they even
accused him of corruption, mainly on the evidence of Nuncomar. The death
of Monson in 1776, and of Clavering in the following year, made Hastings
again supreme in the council. But a dispute with Francis, more than
usually embittered, led in August 1780 to a minute being delivered to
the council board by Hastings, in which he stated that "he judged of the
public conduct of Mr Francis by his experience of his private, which he
had found to be void of truth and honour." A duel was the consequence,
in which Francis received a dangerous wound (see HASTINGS, WARREN).
Though his recovery was rapid and complete, he did not choose to prolong
his stay abroad. He arrived in England in October 1781, and was received
with little favour.
Little is known of the nature of his occupations during the next two
years, except that he was untiring in his efforts to procure first the
recall, and afterwards the impeachment of his hitherto triumphant
adversary. In 1783 Fox produced his India Bill, which led to the
overthrow of the coalition government. In 1784 Francis was returned by
the borough of Yarmouth, Isle of Wight; and although he took an
opportunity to disclaim every feeling of personal animosity towards
Hastings, this did not prevent him, on the return of the latter in 1785,
from doing all in his power to bring forward and support the charges
which ultimately led to the impeachment resolutions of 1787. Although
excluded by a majority of the House from the list of the managers of
that impeachment, Francis was none the less its most energetic promoter,
supplying his friends Burke and Sheridan with all the materials for
their eloquent orations and burning invectives. At the general election
of 1790 he was returned member for Bletchingley. He sympathized warmly
and actively with the French revolutionary doctrines, expostulating with
Burke on his vehement denunciation of the same. In 1793 he supported
Grey's motion for a return to the old constitutional system of
representation, and so earned the title to be regarded as one of the
earliest promoters of the cause of parliamentary reform; and he was one
of the founders of the "Society of the Friends of the People." The
acquittal of Hastings in April 1795 disappointed Francis of the
governor-generalship, and in 1798 he had to submit to the additional
mortification of a defeat in the general election. He was once more
successful, however, in 1802, when he sat for Appleby, and it seemed as
if the great ambitions of his life were about to be realized when the
Whig party came into power in 1806. His disappointment was great when
the governor-generalship was, owing to party exigencies, conferred on
Sir Gilbert Elliot (Lord Minto); he declined, it is said, soon
afterwards the government of the Cape, but accepted a K.C.B. Though
re-elected for Appleby in 1806, he failed to secure a seat in the
following year; and the remainder of his life was spent in comparative
privacy.
Among the later productions of his pen were, besides the _Plan of a
Reform in the Election of the House of Commons_, pamphlets entitled
_Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade_ (1796),
_Reflections on the Abundance of Paper in Circulation and the Scarcity
of Specie_ (1810), _Historical Questions Exhibited_ (1818), and a
_Letter to Earl Grey on the Policy of Great Britain and the Allies
towards Norway_ (1814). His first wife, by whom he had six children,
died in 1806, and in 1814 he married his second wife, Emma Watkins, who
long survived him, and who left voluminous manuscripts relating to his
biography. Francis died on the 23rd of December 1818. In his domestic
relations he was exemplary, and he lived on terms of mutual affection
with a wide circle of friends. He was, however, full of vindictiveness,
dissimulation and treachery, and there can be little doubt that in his
historic conflict with Warren Hastings unworthy personal motives played
a leading part.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--For the evidence identifying Francis with Junius see
the article Junius, and the authorities there cited. See also _Memoirs
of Sir Philip Francis, with Correspondence and Journals_, by Joseph
Parkes and Herman Merivale (2 vols., London, 1867); _The Francis
Letters_, edited by Beata Francis and Eliza Keary (2 vols., London,
1901); Sir J.F. Stephen, _The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of
Sir E. Impey_ (2 vols., London, 1885); Lord Macaulay's _Essay_ on
"Warren Hastings"; G.B. Malleson, _Life of Warren Hastings_ (London,
1894); G.W. Forrest, _The Administration of Warren Hastings,
1772-1785_ (Calcutta, 1892); Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Francis
in _Dict. of Nat. Biog._ vol. xx.
FRANCIS JOSEPH I. (1830- ), emperor of Austria, king of Bohemia, and
apostolic king of Hungary, was the eldest son of the archduke Francis
Charles, second son of the reigning emperor Francis I., being born on
the 18th of August 1830. His mother, the archduchess Sophia, was
daughter of Maximilian I., king of Bavaria. She was a woman of great
ability and strong character, and during the years which followed the
death of the emperor Francis was probably the most influential personage
at the Austrian court; for the emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded in 1835,
was physically and mentally incapable of performing the duties of his
office; as he was childless, Francis Joseph was in the direct line of
succession. During the disturbances of 1848, Francis Joseph spent some
time in Italy, where, under Radetzky, at the battle of St Lucia, he had
his first experience of warfare. At the end of that year, after the
rising of Vienna and capture of the city by Windischgraetz, it was
clearly desirable that there should be a more vigorous ruler at the head
of the empire, and Ferdinand, now that the young archduke was of age,
was able to carry out the abdication which he and his wife had long
desired. All the preparations were made with the utmost secrecy; on the
2nd of December 1848, in the archiepiscopal palace at Olmuetz, whither
the court had fled from Vienna, the emperor abdicated. His brother
resigned his rights of succession to his son, and Francis Joseph was
proclaimed emperor. Ferdinand retired to Prague, where he died in 1875.
The history of the Dual Monarchy during his reign is told under the
heading of AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, and here it is only necessary to deal with
its personal aspects. The young emperor was during the first years of
his reign completely in the hands of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, to
whom, with Windischgraetz and Radetzky, he owed it that Austria had
emerged from the revolution apparently stronger than it had been before.
The first task was to reduce Hungary to obedience, for the Magyars
refused to acknowledge the validity of the abdication in so far as it
concerned Hungary, on the ground that such an act would only be valid
with the consent of the Hungarian parliament. A further motive for their
attitude was that Francis Joseph, unlike his predecessor, had not taken
the oath to observe the Hungarian constitution, which it was the avowed
object of Schwarzenberg to overthrow. In the war which followed the
emperor himself took part, but it was not brought to a successful
conclusion till the help of the Russians had been called in. Hungary,
deprived of her ancient constitution, became an integral part of the
Austrian empire. The new reign began, therefore, under sinister omens,
with the suppression of liberty in Italy, Hungary and Germany. In 1853 a
Hungarian named Lebenyi attempted to assassinate the emperor, and
succeeded in inflicting a serious wound with a knife. With the death of
Schwarzenberg in 1852 the personal government of the emperor really
began, and with it that long series of experiments of which Austria has
been the subject. Generally it may be said that throughout his long
reign Francis Joseph remained the real ruler of his dominions; he not
only kept in his hands the appointment and dismissal of his ministers,
but himself directed their policy, and owing to the great knowledge of
affairs, the unremitting diligence and clearness of apprehension, to
which all who transacted business with him have borne testimony, he was
able to keep a very real control even of the details of government.
The recognition of the separate status of Hungary, and the restoration
of the Magyar constitution in 1866, necessarily made some change in his
position, and so far as concerns Hungary he fully accepted the doctrine
that ministers are responsible to parliament. In the other half of the
monarchy (the so-called Cisleithan) this was not possible, and the
authority and influence of the emperor were even increased by the
contrast with the weaknesses and failures of the parliamentary system.
The most noticeable features in his reign were the repeated and sudden
changes of policy, which, while they arose from the extreme difficulty
of finding any system by which the Habsburg monarchy could be governed,
were due also to the personal idiosyncrasies of the emperor. First we
have the attempt at the autocratic centralization of the whole monarchy
under Bach; the personal influence of the emperor is seen in the
conclusion of the Concordat with Rome, by which in 1855 the work of
Joseph II. was undone and the power of the papacy for a while restored.
The foreign policy of this period brought about the complete isolation
of Austria, and the "ingratitude" towards Russia, as shown during the
period of the Crimean War, which has become proverbial, caused a
permanent estrangement between the two great Eastern empires and the
imperial families. The system led inevitably to bankruptcy and ruin; the
war of 1859, by bringing it to an end, saved the monarchy. After the
first defeat Francis Joseph hastened to Italy; he commanded in person at
Solferino, and by a meeting with Napoleon arranged the terms of the
peace of Villafranca. The next six years, both in home and foreign
policy, were marked by great vacillation. In order to meet the universal
discontent and the financial difficulties constitutional government was
introduced; a parliament was established in which all races of the
empire were represented, and in place of centralized despotism was
established Liberal centralization under Schmerling and the German
Liberals. But the Magyars refused to send representatives to the central
parliament; the Slavs, resenting the Germanizing policy of the
government, withdrew; and the emperor had really withdrawn his
confidence from Schmerling long before the constitution was suspended in
1865 as a first step to a reconciliation with Hungary. In the
complicated German affairs the emperor in vain sought for a minister on
whose knowledge and advice he could depend. He was guided in turn by the
inconsistent advice of Schmerling, Rechberg, Mensdorff, not to mention
more obscure counsellors, and it is not surprising that Austria was
repeatedly outmatched and outwitted by Prussia. In 1863, at the
_Fuerstentag_ in Frankfort, the emperor made an attempt by his personal
influence to solve the German question. He invited all the German
sovereigns to meet him in conference, and laid before them a plan for
the reconstruction of the confederation. The momentary effect was
immense; for some of the halo of the Holy Empire still clung round the
head of the house of Habsburg, and Francis Joseph was welcomed to the
ancient free city with enthusiasm. In spite of this, however, and of the
skill with which he presided over the debates, the conference came to
nothing owing to the refusal of the king of Prussia to attend.
The German question was settled definitively by the battle of Koeniggraetz
in 1866; and the emperor Francis Joseph, with characteristic Habsburg
opportunism, was quick to accommodate himself to the new circumstances.
Above all, he recognized the necessity for reconciling the Magyars to
the monarchy; for it was their discontent that had mainly contributed to
the collapse of the Austrian power. He had already, in 1859, as the
result of a visit to Budapest, made certain modifications in the Bach
system by way of concession to Magyar sentiment, and in 1861 he had had
an interview with Deak, during which, though unconvinced by that
statesman's arguments, he had at least assured himself of his loyalty.
He now made Beust, Bismarck's Saxon antagonist, the head of his
government, as the result of whose negotiations with Deak the
Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was agreed upon. A law was passed by
the Hungarian diet regularizing the abdication of Ferdinand; at the
beginning of June Francis Joseph signed the inaugural diploma and took
the oath in Magyar to observe the constitution; on the 8th he was
solemnly crowned king of Hungary. The traditional coronation gift of
100,000 florins he assigned to the widows and orphans of those who had
fallen in the war against Austria in 1849.
Once having accepted the principle of constitutional government, the
emperor-king adhered to it loyally, in spite of the discouragement
caused by party struggles embittered by racial antagonisms. If in the
Cisleithan half of the monarchy parliamentary government broke down,
this was through no fault of the emperor, who worked hard to find a
_modus vivendi_ between the factions, and did not shrink from
introducing manhood suffrage in the attempt to establish a stable
parliamentary system. This expedient, indeed, probably also conveyed a
veiled threat to the Magyar chauvinists, who, discontented with the
restrictions placed upon Hungarian independence under the Compromise,
were agitating for the complete separation of Austria and Hungary under
a personal union only; for universal suffrage in Hungary would mean the
subordination of the Magyar minority to the hitherto subject races. For
nearly forty years after the acceptance of the Compromise the attitude
of the emperor-king towards the Magyar constitution had been
scrupulously correct. The agitation for the completely separate
organization of the Hungarian army, and for the substitution of Magyar
for German in words of command in Hungarian regiments, broke down the
patience of the emperor, tenacious of his prerogative as supreme "war
lord" of the common army. A Hungarian deputation which came to Vienna in
September 1905 to urge the Magyar claims was received ungraciously by
the emperor, who did not offer his hand to the members, addressed them
in German, and referred them brusquely to the chancellor, Count
Goluchowski. This incident caused a considerable sensation, and was the
prelude to a long crisis in Hungarian affairs, during which the
emperor-king, while quick to repair the unfortunate impression produced
by his momentary pique, held inflexibly to his resolve in the matter of
the common army.
In his relations with the Slavs the emperor displayed the same
conciliatory disposition as in the case of the Magyars; but though he
more than once held out hopes that he would be crowned at Prague as king
of Bohemia, the project was always abandoned. In this, indeed, as in
other cases, it may be said that the emperor was guided less by any
abstract principles than by a common-sense appreciation of the needs and
possibilities of the moment. Whatever his natural prejudices or natural
resentments, he never allowed these to influence his policy. The German
empire and the Italian kingdom had been built up out of the ruins of
immemorial Habsburg ambitions; yet he refused to be drawn into an
alliance with France in 1869 and 1870, and became the mainstay of the
Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy. His reputation as
a consistent moderating influence in European policy and one of the
chief guarantors of European peace was indeed rudely shaken in October
1908, the year in which he celebrated his sixty years' jubilee as
emperor, by the issue of the imperial recript annexing Bosnia and
Herzegovina to the Habsburg dominions, in violation of the terms of the
treaty of Berlin. But his opportunism was again justified by the result.
Europe lost an ideal; but Austria gained two provinces.
In his private life the emperor was the victim of terrible
catastrophes--his wife, his brother and his only son having been
destroyed by sudden and violent deaths. He married in 1854 Elizabeth,
daughter of Maximilian Joseph, duke of Bavaria, who belonged to the
younger and non-royal branch of the house of Wittelsbach. The empress,
who shared the remarkable beauty common to all her family, took little
part in the public life of Austria. After the first years of married
life she was seldom seen in Vienna, and spent much of her time in
travelling. She built a castle of great beauty and magnificence, called
the Achilleion, in the island of Corfu, where she often o resided. In
1867 she accompanied the emperor to Budapest, and took much interest in
the reconciliation with the Magyars. She became a good Hungarian
scholar, and spent much time in Hungary. An admirable horsewoman, in
later years she repeatedly visited England and Irland for the hunting
season. In 1897 she was assassinated at Geneva by an Italian anarchist;
previous attempts had been made on her and on her husband during a visit
to Trieste.
There was one son of the marriage, the crown prince Rudolph (1857-1889).
A man of much ability and promise, he was a good linguist, and showed
great interest in natural history. He published two works, _Fifteen Days
on the Danube_ and _A Journey in the East_, and also promoted
illustrated work giving a full description of the whole Austro-Hungarian
monarchy; he personally shared the labours of the editorial work. In
1881 he merried Stephanie, daughter of the king of the Belgians. On 30th
January 1889 he commited suicide at Mayerling, a country house near
Vienna. He left one daughter, Elizabeth, who was betrothed to Count
Alfred Windischgraetz in 1901. In 1900 his widow, the crown princess
Stephanie, married Count Lonyay; by this she sacrificed her rank and
position within the Austrian monarchy. Besides the crown prince the
empress gave birth to three daughters, of whom two survive: Gisela (born
1857), who married a son of the prince regent of Bavaria; and Marie
Valerie (born 1868), who married the archduke Franz Salvator of Tuscany.
See J. Emmer. _Kaisser Franz Joseph_ (2 vols., Vienna, 1898); J.
Schnitzer, _Franz Joseph I. und seine Zeit_ (2 vols., _ib._, 1899);
_Viribis unitis. Das Buch vom Kaiser_, with introduction by J.A. v.
Halfert, ed. M. Herzig (_ib._, 1898); R. Rostok, _Die Regierungszeit
des K. u. K. Franz Joseph I._ (3rd ed. _ib._, 1903).