of all, if consequences are to be regarded, that is, the lapse of the
Tudor race in Elizabeth and the succession of the Stuarts. Another very
weak point is the commencing of the 290 years prior to the first issue
of the quatrains. According to this, two of the Revolutions were already
elapsed. A man does not prophesy of what is past. Nostradamus was writing
in the reign of Queen Mary, so that the first Revolution would naturally
count from 1558, when Elizabeth re-introduced Protestantism.
Now that we have contrived a firmer basis, let us see what this leads to.
No. 1. Elizabeth comes to the throne, November 17, 1558.
No. 2. James I. (Stuart succession), March 24, 1603. Queen Elizabeth dies
exactly one hundred years after her namesake, Queen of Henry VII.
No. 3. Commonwealth on death of Charles I., January 30, 1649;
Protectorate, Cromwell, December 16, 1653.
No. 4. Restoration, Charles II., May 29, 1660 (on his 30th birthday).
No. 5. William III. and Mary, November 5, 1668; Revolution (Gunpowder
Day).
No. 6. Hanoverian succession, George I., May 21, 1714.
No. 7. Reform Bill, June 17, 1832. (Dulling the lustre of the Crown, as
we shall see the French King _mitré_.)
Those who wish to prophesy pleasant things can do away with the
disagreeable date of the Reform Bill, in part, because the No. 3
Revolution can fairly be interpreted as two Revolutions. Cromwell’s
usurpation belied the pretended principles of his whole life and conduct
prior to that assumption, and can be called a new order of things. This
arrangement will obviate the necessity of classifying the Reform Bill
as the 7th Revolution. But the 290 years must end where they do, though
you can regard the matter in what light you please. But I look upon
Cromwell’s treason, not to the King, but to himself as a man, as being
practically part and parcel of the Commonwealth, or a horn growing out
of the head of that rhinoceros or unicorn: nothing more. Given a popular
revolt, a self-seeking horn always grows out of the forehead of the
beast, till, with a ring in its nostril, it is driven whither its sublime
liberties shall dictate.
Take it either way, it seems to me quite beyond the reach of the ordinary
human mind, simply left to its own resources, to strike out four lines
so pregnant as these, and await silently, for three hundred years,
an interpretation, so little forced or driven as this is. I may say
that to even pack into the space of four lines a mass of assertions so
pregnant with hints, is a feat in condensation that no poet has ever
equalled. Tacitus, the tersest of historians, has never approached it. No
précis writer of the most accomplished skill has ever reduced the facts
furnished to him in a well-drawn manuscript to such a compass. He could
not, and remain intelligible. To those who will merely look at it in this
light it may afford endless matter of reflection and curious study. As a
forecast, its appearance to me is purely miraculous. Let any one explain
it otherwise who thinks he can; we shall all be ready to learn.
STUART DYNASTY (1603-1649). [I. 138.]
_Century X.—Quatrain 40._
La jeunne[181] nay au regne Britannique,
Qu’aura le pere mourant recommandé
Iceluy mort, Lonole[182] donra[183] topique,[184]
Et à son fils le regne, demandé.
_Translation._
The young Prince of the Kingdom of Britain,
Whose dying father will have recommended him;
This one being dead, Lonole will perorate,
And snatch the kingdom from his very son.
James I. of England and VI. of Scotland was born June 19, 1566: the son
of Mary Stuart and Henry Lord Darnley; who, before his assassination
by Bothwell, had commended the young prince to the fidelity of the
Scotch lords. He ascended the throne of England in 1603, and under him
England and Scotland were first denominated Great Britain (_au regne
Britannique_).[185] When King James I. dies (_Iceluy mort_), _Lonole_
will seduce England with artificial rhetoric, and demand the kingdom and
the life of his son Charles I.
Lonole is the right reading, according to the _Texte-type_; others read
_Doudlé_, and Garencières reads _Londre_. He also fancies that the
prophecy concerns Charles II., because Charles I. commended him to the
people of England. It is rather curious that _Lonole_ should give the
anagram of Olleon, or Ὀλλύων, as Napoleon does that of Ναπολλύων and
Apollyon. Cromwell and he have many analogies and points of contact,
whether in history, character, or prophecy. But a further anagram, still
more wonderful, springs here into view, which, I believe, has hitherto
escaped all the commentators. _Ole Nol_, or _Old Noll_, has always been
the Protector’s nickname, and in the first form is letter for letter
_Lonole_. It may stand for Apollyon also, and as such for “Old Nick” too.
I ought not to pass away from this mass and congeries of singular
hints and disclosures without pointing out the remarkable fact or link
connecting James I. with Nostradamus, and the particular quatrain we
are now dealing with. James I. was born June 19, 1566, and thirteen
days after, July 2, 1566, Nostradamus breathed his last. This quatrain,
once understood, is one of the clearest and most extraordinary of the
forecasts of Nostradamus. The commencing event, the birth of James I.,
just touches his own death; and the last event, the death of Charles I.,
1649, stretches to nearly a hundred years later.
Anagram seems to have been once a passion with the people. We find the
white cloth of Lincoln in the thirteenth century alluded to as “Drap
blanc de _Nicole_,” that standing for _Lincoln_. [Le Roux de Lincy “Livre
des Prov. Franc.” i. 195.]
FALL OF CHARLES I. (MARCH 31, 1646). [I. 139.]
_Century III.—Quatrain 80._
Du regne Anglais le digne dechassé,[186]
Le conseiller par[187] ire[188] mis à feu,
Ses adherans iront si bas tracer,[189]
Que le bastard sera demy receu.
_Translation._
He who had the right to reign in England, shall be driven from
the throne, his counsellor abandoned (_mis a feu_) to the fury
of the populace (_par ire_). His adherents will follow so low a
track that the usurper (_le bastard_) will come to be Protector
(_demy receu_, or half King).
Garencières fancies this to relate to Charles II., and, that it is very
clear. But evidently _le digne dechassé_ is Charles I. Strafford was
surrendered weakly to the unreasoning rage of the people (_par ire_).
The Scotch, his countrymen (_ses adherents_), will sell him for £400,000
(Hume, vii. 76) to the Independents with unexampled baseness (_si bas
tracer_). After this Cromwell (_le bastard_) will become Protector, or
half king (_sera demy receu_).
This could scarcely be made more remarkable than it is, had it been
written historically after the event, as history, than it is now before
it, as prophecy. Look, again, at the overwhelming insight and terseness:
the King defeated, Strafford sacrificed, the Covenanters’ money bargain,
and the Protectorate chalked out in decisive outline nearly a century
before the realization: and each event is contained in one metrical
phrase.
EXECUTION OF CHARLES I. (JANUARY 30, 1649). [I. 141.]
_Century IX.—Quatrain 49._
Gand et Bruceles marcheront contre[190] Anvers,
Senat de Londres mettront à mort leur Roy:
Le sel et vin luy seront à l’envers,
Pour eux avoir le regne en desarroy.
_Translation._
Gand and Brussels will march past Antwerp,
The Senate at London will put their King to death;
Salt and wine will be applied contrariwise,
So that they will set the whole kingdom in disarray.
Philip IV. in the Netherlands, being at war, will move Gand and Brussels
towards Antwerp against Holland in revolt. Holland had, in 1579, detached
itself from the Low Countries. Thus Antwerp became the border town of the
Spanish possessions. Philip claimed rights over her till the treaty of
Westphalia, or Munster, of which we have Terburg’s curious portraiture in
the National Gallery, concluded on October 14, 1648; three months only
before the death of Charles I., so that the conjunction of the two events
is extraordinarily definite and remarkable.
The second line is as definite and marvellous as anything that occurs
in Nostradamus. By the treaty of Munster it fixes the date to within
three months. Garencières says: “It is the most remarkable of all those
[prophecies] that ever Nostradamus was author of.” He notifies also, what
I think nobody else has, that the number of this quatrain, 49, gives the
very year of the occurrence in the seventeenth century. For though we in
England then called it 1648-49, Nostradamus, by the Gregorian Calendar
used in France, would reckon it as 1649. We need lay no stress whatever
upon this, for the quatrain wants nothing to strengthen it. Yet, be it
the offspring of chance or intention, it is most singular. I have before
said how much value lies in mere curiosities, and it is part of my
business to point one out whenever I am able.
We have already handled the phrase _vin sel_ at p. 151 and 153 [I. 119],
but from a French, and not English point of view; yet even there the line
is
L’Isle Britanne par vin sel en souci.
—showing the consistency with which the visions must have shaped
themselves in the mind of Nostradamus. The one we are treating of now
appears in the ninth century of the prophet’s quatrains, but the above
line occurs in a quatrain of the tenth century. Still, what is said in
the one is consistent with what is said in the other. If we call this
chance, we shall have to admit an axiom far from self-evident; namely,
that method is discernible in chance as well as in madness. Here, as at
disgraceful Old Pancras graveyard, there is clearly a slight derangement
of epitaphs.
Bouys and nearly all the commentators treat the figure of _le vin et
sel_, as representing force and wisdom, which were wanting to the
King of England. I think we are not at all necessitated to adopt this
interpretation. Supposing _salt_ and _wine_ in a good sense to symbolize
wisdom and power, before we settle that to be their application here, we
shall have to understand what _à l’envers_ means. In the first place, it
is not the preposition _envers_, meaning _for_, or _in regard to_. It is
a noun substantive, masculine, and stands for the wrong side of a fabric,
as contrasted with, or opposed to, the right side, called _l’endroit_.
It means that wisdom and power will present their wrong aspect at
this juncture, and become intrigue and violence, and will so stand to
him (_lui seront à l’envers_), as that they will convert into their
opposites, intrigue and violence. It has the old sense of _inversus_, as
in the _Roman de la Rose_. A person is there told that on going to bed no
sleep will come, but tossing from one side to the other:
Une heure _envers_ et l’autre adens
Come cil qui a mal aus dens.
Here it reads one hour on the _back_, another on the teeth. Molière says
of a character (_l’Et._ ii. 14):
Vous serez toujours....
Un envers du bon sens, un jugement à gauche.
Nothing can better describe the mockery in Westminster Hall of the trial
of the King than _un jugement à gauche_. The third line of the quatrain
is the precise equivalent. _Vin_ so nearly resembles vis that it is
sure to mean force, the two extremes of which are power and violence,
law and lawlessness. We see this very distinctly in the old French word
_vimaire_, force majeure (_vis major_) and the word further signified
storm, tempest, famine, and pestilence (_vide_ Roquefort, _s.v._). That
wine does not at all definitely stand for power well directed, is plain
enough from “the wine of fornication” (Rev. xvii. 2); and that salt is
not to be taken as wisdom personified with fixity may be gathered, if
from nothing else, from the sanctification of the sacramental elements in
the Church of Rome; where before salt is used, it is first exorcised, to
purify it from the stain of original sin, that passed upon all creation
at the fall (Auber’s “Symbolisme,” iii. 394). Whatever wisdom Godwin,
Carlyle, and other modern revolutionists may suppose themselves to have
discovered in the character of Cromwell, Nostradamus certainly had formed
no such notion of him, as we shall immediately feel assured by the next
quatrain. Nostradamus’s opinion of Cromwell may determine nothing at all
as to the final estimate of that man. I adduce it only to help to settle
what he meant by the words we are studying, _le sel et vin_. The next
line is plain enough. The Independents set the whole kingdom by the ears.
I think we have reached a point at which every line of this quatrain has
become tolerably clear. A wiseacre, writing about it in the _Quarterly
Review_ (vol. xxvi. p. 189) says: “Œdipus himself could not give the
sense of the whole verse.” This is the way in which people treat a
difficult, abstruse, and intricate subject. It is so easy to say we have
made up our mind about a man; that he is unintelligible, a charlatan,
an impostor; that his forecasts are oracular nonsense, meaning nothing,
or that if at times they do light on something, chance has more to do
with it than seership or vision. You would certainly think that a sane
man, finding in a book,—that indubitably was in print,—in 1558 a line
prophesying the death of the King of England nearly a hundred years
after, “Senat de Londres mettront à mort leur Roy,” would be struck with
astonishment at the clearness of that, rather than with the difficulty of
making sense of the other three lines. But this is what prejudice can do
with us all.
CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE (1653-1658). [I. 142.]
_Century VIII.—Quatrain 76._
Plus Macelin[191] que Roy en Angleterre,
Lieu obscur nay[192] par force aura l’empire,
Lasche sans foy sans loy saignera terre:
Son temps approche si près que je souspire.
_Translation._
A Butcher more than king rules England. A man of no birth will
seize the government by violence. Of loose morals, without
faith or law he will bleed the earth. The hour approaches me so
near that I breathe with difficulty.
Here we have a most remarkable forecast. It puts in a clear light what
view Nostradamus had formed of Cromwell. There appears to have been
visually present to him the butcher-like face of Cromwell, with its
fleshly conch and hideous warts. This seems to have struck him with such
a sense of vividness and horror, that he is willing to imagine that the
time is very near at hand. A full century had, however, to elapse; but he
sighs as with a present shudder, and the blood creeps:
Son temps s’approche si près que je souspire.
One of the most remarkable features throughout the work of Nostradamus,
is the general absence of any sense of time, apart from the mere
enumeration of years as an algebraic or arithmetical formula; further
than this, he so regulates and controls his feelings as to appear almost
impassible; but this announcement is of such unparalleled and terrific
import that he departs from his usual practice and stands horror-stricken
as in the presence of a fearful vision.
It was intended to treat here of the portraiture of Cromwell. To
complete, however, my observations, I had to go to Chequers Court,
the Print Room, and the National Portrait Gallery. These and other
necessary steps occupied so much time that the printers had to commence
paging; then, as the enlarged matter could not find room here, there
was no alternative but an Appendix, which will be found at p. 351. My
remarks, which make so little show now that they are done, cost me far
more trouble than ten times the mere amount of writing would. The final
settlement depends on the cast at Florence, if still in existence. I have
cleared the road for a decisive conclusion; which, though it is not much,
is yet something.
Bouys specially comments (p. 109) upon the word _Lasche_ in this
quatrain, and takes it to mean cowardly, the same as _lâche_ does in
modern French. Both forms of the word are alike deduced from the Latin,
_laxare_, _laxatus_, and then it might well mean of _loose morals_, as
I have rendered it. That the Latin may mean this Bailey’s “Facciolati”
shows, _s.v._ _Laxitas_: “Liber membris cum mollibus fingitur, et
liquoris feminei dissolutissimus laxitate”; and Cromwell’s dissolute
life in early youth has been insisted on by many, though, of course,
contradicted by others. Frederic Harrison is the last of these, and
passes over the charge of vice with a very light hand, saying that “Such
testimony as theirs we cannot trust; but we cannot now refute it.”
Suffice it to say, I do not think cowardice was what Nostradamus meant to
impute to Cromwell.
The obscure birth requires a moment’s consideration, as none of the
French commentators allude in any way to it. The household of Robert
Cromwell, Oliver’s father, in Huntingdon, was of the industrious,
jog-trot, somewhat over-professingly pious, middle-class order, common
enough then in the Eastern counties. What is most remarkable, perhaps,
is that the homestead, in which he was born, had been built upon the
ruins of a convent of Augustine Friars, and that the two estates which
came to him, one from his father and the other from his mother’s
brother, consisted of old church-lands. Oliver’s branch of the family
had rather fallen away from the county position which such inheritance
infers. But it was always the more prominent families that stole, or
possessed themselves of, the church-lands at the spoliation, and thus
the Cromwells were married in and in with gentry. This scion of the
robbers of the Church was soon to develop, on his own account, into
a robber of the State; a man of violence and passion quite after the
heart of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle’s notion of a hero, is a strong devil
in a tantrum, mollifying, now and again, to the drone of a Psalm tune.
Cromwell’s branch seems to have drifted from the more courtly side to
Calvinistic burghers and narrow-souled Independents; whilst Milton, who
was born a London citizen, far away from gentry, was floated by his
tastes and nature to the Court side of things, to the Bridgewaters,
Ludlow Castle (see his deathless Masque of Comus), until a lofty
idea of principle,—taken up by an unripe judgment, and dazzled by
that false illusion, Liberty,—dashed him headlong into polemics, and
irretrievably damaged the greatest poet ever born to England. They were
exact opposites—these two. Milton sacrificed himself to his principles,
Cromwell his principles to his person. Still, an old brewing concern
at Huntingdon may well be designated by Nostradamus _lieu obscur_, as
contrasted with Whitehall, and a burial, if you please, in Westminster
Abbey, so wastefully extravagant as that it might well break a nation’s
treasury to meet it. Such prodigious pageantry belies the professions of
the life, and can in no way be harmonized with “Take that bauble hence.”
Such empty, worthless show has less, for me, of the saint and hero in it,
than of the froth of beer, and of the littleness and vanity of man. If
this is to be great, prythee, tell us, what is it to be little?
BRITISH ASCENDANCY OF THE SEA (OVER THREE CENTURIES). [I. 143.]
_Century X.—Quatrain 100._
Le grand empire sera par Angleterre.
Le pempotam[193] des ans plus de trois cens:
Grandes copies[194] passer par mer et terre.
Les Lusitains[195] n’en seront pas contens.
_Translation._
England the Pempotam (πᾶν _potens_) will rule the great empire
(of the waters) for more than three hundred years. Great armies
will pass by sea and land; the Portuguese will not be satisfied.
The French render this as meaning the destruction of England by large
forces coming to overwhelm her by sea and land, but the reader will
see that it does not at all necessarily show this. If we altered the
colon, and put it at the end of the third line, it would simply mean
that, whilst she was “all powerful” at sea, she moved large bodies of
troops by both elements. I do not think it is very clear what the last
line intends. But the three hundred years’ dominion of the sea is a very
palpable and most important object. That it is now drawing to a close
is a somewhat melancholy subject for the contemplation of Englishmen,
when we consider the searching revolution introduced by steam. If it
really forebodes evil to England, it would involve dissatisfaction to
the Lusitanians, as, if England fell, Portugal would be overwhelmed
simultaneously by Spain.
The Invincible Armada of Philip II. was destroyed in 1588 by storms
first, and the residue by Drake in Cadiz Bay. From that epoch we
naturally date the maritime supremacy of our country, which, according
to Nostradamus, is to last for more than three centuries, but not four.
Nelson’s death at Trafalgar in 1805 was the culminating event of our
naval history. Its salt-sea tale still stirs young hearts in far-off
sea-board cottages on stormy nights in winter with a flush of heroism,
and that yet more sacred thing, a solemn sense of duty. But the old
sobriety and obedient spirit of reverence, that was common in English
homes last century is greatly decadent under the rotten knowledge
dropping widely from the Upas Board Schools,—with reverence banished
and obedience lost. The bare three hundred years ended in 1888. What
the _plus_ may count for, with Revolt thus bred at every hearth, a wise
Englishman might ask with some emotion now.
It is said, in James’s “Naval History,” that from 1793 to 1815—I have
not referred to verify—two hundred ships of the line, and three to
four hundred frigates were taken or destroyed of the fleets opposed to
England; and of the sea as at the pouring out of the second vial, ἐγένετο
αἷμα ὡς νεκροῦ, it became as the blood of a dead man (Rev. xvi. 3). This
completely crushed out all chance of Napoleon’s descent upon England;
but, with the lying spirit that distinguished his administration at all
times, he managed to disguise the fact from Frenchmen at the time; so
that we find Bouys, at p. 92, promising him—out of two misinterpreted
quatrains—in 1806, when his fleet was annihilated, the empire of the sea
and a conquest of England as complete as that of William the Conqueror.
It only proves once more how far from truth is the wish that is father to
the thought. Let him stand aloof who would read the future by the light
of the lantern of his prejudices.
We are now at the end of the guidance of Le Pelletier. Nevertheless, I
will adduce several other quatrains to bring the English sequence down to
the succession of the House of Hanover. They will perhaps not be devoid
of instruction, though they will not be so remarkable as those already
adduced. Several quatrains, more or less intelligibly wrought out, are
enumerated in a pamphlet of the year 1715 by D. D.[196] The first relates
to Queen Mary.
QUEEN MARY.
_Century IV.—Quatrain 96._
La Sœur aisnee de L’Isle Britannique,
Quinze ans devant le frère aura naissance,
Par son promis, moyennant verrifique,
Succedera au Règne de Balance.
_Translation._
The elder sister of the British Isle shall be born fifteen
years before her brother; true to her intervening promise, she
will succeed to the Kingdom of the Balance.