The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866

To the readers of the newspapers, the name of Mr. Moens is known as that of the English gentleman who was taken by brigands in May of last year, on his return from a little pleasure excursion to Pæstum. He and his party—consisting of his wife and the Rev. Mr. Aynsley and wife—had trusted too implicitly in the notice given by their landlord that the road from Salerno to the famous temples was free from brigands, and guarded by troops. Near a little town called Battipaglia, the military having been withdrawn temporarily to permit the families of some captives to negotiate their ransom with the band of Giardullo, the band of Manzo swooped down upon the unhappy tourists, and carried off both the gentlemen of the party. The troops appeared almost immediately after the capture, but the brigands escaped with their prisoners, one of whom they released a few days later, that he might return to Naples, and raise the ransom demanded for himself and his friend. The book, from this point, is the relation of Mr. Moens's trials and adventures with the bandits, and Mrs. Moens's hardly less terrible efforts and anxieties for his release. It was decided by the band that their captive was a Milord, and they demanded a ransom of $200,000 for him, subsequently reducing the sum to $30,000, which was paid them in instalments, and which having received in full, they released their prisoner after a captivity of four months. All the negotiations for the ransom of Mr. Moens had to be carried on in defiance of Italian law, and by indulgence of its officers; for to supply the brigands with food or money is an offence punishable with twenty years in the galleys. Generous English friends at Naples interested themselves in the affair, and the aid which Mrs. Moens received from Italians in private and official station was no less cordial and constant. Indeed, the business of Mr. Moens's recapture became of almost international importance. All the Italian troops in the region were employed in pursuit of Manzo's band; and a British man-of-war was sent to a certain point on the coast, in the hope that the bandits could be induced to go on board by the promise of impunity, and transfer to England.

In the mean time Mr. Moens remained with his captors, sharing all their perils and privations, and making perforce the most faithful study ever made of their life. It must be confessed that the picture has few features attractive to people at peace with society. Most of the brigands are men who have placed themselves beyond the law by some hideous crime,—or misfortune, as they would call it in Naples,—and in other cases they are idle ruffians, who have taken to robbery because they like it. They generally look forward to a time when, having placed a sufficient amount of money at interest, they can surrender themselves to the authorities, pass a few comfortable years in prison, and issue forth ornaments to society. To be sure, this scheme is subject to chances. They are hunted by the soldiers, day and night, like wild beasts; and, if taken under arms, are shot without trial. Half the time they are without food, and suffer the agonies of hunger and thirst; and they are always without shelter, except such as trees or caverns can give. When they have anything, they "eat their bread with carefulness, and drink their water with astonishment,"—quarrelling over it a good deal, and trying to steal from one another. When they have nothing, they buckle their belts tighter, and bear it as best they may.

Mr. Moens, who fared no better than the rest, does not seem to have fared much worse. Indeed, he was much more comfortably situated than the ladies of the band, who, being dressed as men, were armed and obliged to fight like their comrades, and yet had no share of the spoils, but received many more cuffs and hard words than we, who have only seen them in pictures, can well associate with the idea of brigandesses.

Being poor ignorant peasants originally, and being afterwards poor ignorant robbers, the brigands inflicted little unnecessary suffering upon their prisoner. Occasionally, to be sure, they struck him; but this was in hot blood, and he was allowed to strike back and restore the balance of justice. These wretched creatures, imbruted and stained with innumerable murders, seem to have had very little idea of the usages of civilized people in regard to captives; and any one who will compare the story of Mr. Moens with the narratives of the prisoners given in Mr. Abbott's book, will see how absurdly the bandits neglected their advantages. After all, it is your high-toned Southern gentleman, compact of the best blood of the Cavaliers and the Huguenots, and presenting in this unhappy hemisphere the finest reflection of the English nobleman's character, who understands best how to use a prisoner. There is nothing like having in your power from childhood a number of helpless human beings, to teach you how to treat a captured enemy; and we cannot help thinking that Mrs. Moens, who will not spare the American Unionists a sneer in the first chapter of her diary, would have understood us better if her husband had been in the hands of Captain Wirz instead of Captain Manzo. Had Mr. Moens been a soldier of the Union, taken while fighting to defend his country against rebellion, he would have been carried into the midst of a people inured to the practice of cruelty by slavery, and all the more abominable because they believed themselves Christian and civilized. There he would have been thrust into a roofless close, already densely thronged with thousands of famished, sick, and maddened men. He would have had no shelter from the blazing sun or drenching storm, except such as the happier wild creatures make themselves in holes and burrows. Guards, emulous in murder, would have been set over him, with instructions to shoot him, if he reached, in the delirium of famine, across a certain line to clutch a bone, or stooped to moisten his lips in a pool less filthy than those at which his comrades quenched their thirst within the bounds. In the mountains of Naples, the brigands gave him to eat and drink of their scanty fare, and shared with him the last crust and the last drop. In Georgia, in the midst of plenty, his keepers would have slowly starved him to death, and would have driven away, with threats and curses, any that offered to succor his distress. If he escaped, they would have hunted him with bloodhounds, and so brought him back; and if he sickened under his torture, they would have left him, naked and unsheltered, to languish with wasting disease and devouring vermin,—to die, or to rot and drop away piecemeal while yet alive.

Other writers on brigandage, besides Mr. Moens, relate anomalous facts concerning it, which can, perhaps, be matched only in this country, where alone the cruelty and impunity of Italian brigandage can be matched. It is well known that for a long time the heirs of Fra Diavolo received from the government a pension bestowed in recognition of that distinguished chief's services to humanity. The retired chief, Talarico, is now in the undisturbed enjoyment of the gains of brigandage upon his place near Naples; and Count Saint-Jorioz, in his interesting work, Il Brigantaggio alla Frontiera, Pontificia, declares that in some cases the employés of the Italian government in the Neapolitan provinces are men known to have been in other times manutengoli, or accomplices of brigands; nay, that sometimes the very courts of law have favored, instigated, and connived at brigandage. Similarly, in our own country, we find men guilty of the cruelties of Andersonville and Columbia, and stained with treason, in the enjoyment of offices and honors throughout the South, while the servants of the law lend themselves to violence and murder with a boldness unheard of in Naples, where there is some show of decency in these things. At least, we have not read of the sindaco and policemen of any town of the Abruzzi who have openly applauded and joined the brigands in hunting and slaughtering peaceable inhabitants, as happened lately in New Orleans and Memphis; and we feel quite sure that, if they had committed such an offence, it would not have been passed over in silence by the head of the Italian people. But, then, with all their errors, the Italians have not yet intrusted great power to the hands of a peasant of the class which produces brigands; whereas we have taken for our chief magistrate a man in whom everything generous and noble seems to have been extinguished by the hard conditions of a poor white's life at the South.

notes

1

The paragraphs here following were written in the summer of 1862, and had been meditated or memorandumed long before. Thus they were not derived from the similar disquisitions of Gail Hamilton in the Atlantic for January, 1863. There is no danger that anybody will suspect that spirituelle lady of extracting her sunbeams out of my poor old cucumbers.

2

An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland, by J. J. Worsaae, Sec. I. p. 6.

3

"What we call purchase, perquisitio," says Blackstone, "the feudists called conquest, conquisitio; both denoting any means of acquiring an estate out of the common course of inheritance. And this is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland, as it was among the Norman jurists, who styled the first purchaser (that is, him who bought the estate into the family which at present owns it) the conqueror, or conquereur, which seems to be all that was meant by the appellation which was given to William the Norman." Had Harold been victorious at Hastings, he would, according to the feudists, have been the Conqueror; that is, the man who brought England into his family.

4

The History of Normandy and of England, Vol. I. pp. 703, 704. One of the greatest historical works of a country and an age singularly rich in historical literature, but incomplete, like the works of Macaulay, Niebuhr, and Arnold, and the last work of Prescott. The third and fourth volumes, posthumously published in 1864,—Sir Francis died in 1861,—are well edited by the author's son, Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave, who honorably upholds the honored name he inherits.

5

Merivale, History of the Romans under the Empire; Vol. IV. p. 297, note: "The civilization of barbarians, at least their material cultivation, has been generally more advanced by instructors whose moral superiority was less strongly marked, than where the teachers and the taught have few common sympathies and points of contact. Thus, in our own times, rough whalers and brutal pirates have done more to Europeanize the natives of Polynesia than the missionaries."

6

A History of England under the Norman Kings, etc., pp. 84, 85, and 87. Dr. Lappenberg is emphatic on the subject of the formation of the Norman race through the junction of various races. "Rolf [Rollo] and his companions were like those meteors which traverse the air with incredible swiftness," he says, "and in vanishing leave behind them long streams of fire which the eye gazes on with amazement. The Northmen who settled in Neustria gradually became lost among the French, a mixture of Gauls and Romans, Franks and Burgundians, West Goths and Saracens, friends and foes, barbarians and civilized nations. Ten sorts of language, and with them, perhaps, as many forms of government, were lost amid this mass of peoples. French and foreigners have visited Normandy in search of some traces of the old Scandinavian colonies, or at least of some testimonial of their long sojourn there, and one or other memorial characteristic of this daring people. All have admired the prosperity of the province, to which the fertility of the soil and its manufactures and commerce have contributed; but vainly have they sought for the original Northmen in the present inhabitants. With the exception of some faint resemblances, they have met with nothing Norsk."—pp. 65, 66.

7

The History of Normandy and of England, Vol. I. pp. 704, 705. Lanfranc, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury by the Conqueror, was a native of Pavia, and Anselm, his successor, a native of Aosta.

8

Rollo and his Race: or, Footsteps of the Normans, Vol. II. pp. 107-109.

9

What Sir F. Palgrave says of the famous son of Robert Guiscard is applicable generally to the Normans: "Bohemond was affectionate and true to father, wife, and children, pleasant, affable, and courteous: yet wrapped up in selfishness, possessed by insatiate ambition and almost diabolical cruelty, proud and faithless, but in spite of all these vices so seductive as to command the admiration even of those who knew him to be a heartless demon."—History Vol. IV. p. 471.

10

"The heart of Emma clung more and more to her native land. Her feelings were inherited by the children who were afterward born to her,—they imbibed them at their mother's breast. Their hearts were thoroughly alienated from England, and the Normans and Normandy became as their kindred and their home."—Palgrave, Vol. III. p. 112. Edward's wife was Editha, daughter of Earl Godwin, and sister of Harold.

11

The History of Normandy and of England, Vol. III. pp. 293, 294.

12

History of the Four Conquests of England, Vol. II. pp. 176-178.

13

The legitimate descent of Queen Victoria from the Conqueror is sometimes disputed, because it is not correctly traced, in consequence of the line of descent being carried back through Henry VII., instead of being carried through his wife, née Elizabeth Plantagenet. It may not be uninteresting to state the royal pedigree, which is at times rather intricate, and full of sinuosities,—in part due to the occurrences of political revolutions, old English statesmen never having paid much regard to political legitimacy, which is a modern notion. Queen Victoria is the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, who was son of George III., who was son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who was son of George II., who was son of George I., who was son of the Electress Sophia (by Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover), who was daughter of Elizabeth Stuart (by Frederick V., Elector Palatine and "Winter King" of Bohemia), who was daughter of James I. (Sixth of Scotland), who was son of Mary, Queen of Scots (by Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley), who was daughter of James V., who was son of Margaret Tudor (by James IV.), who was daughter of Elizabeth Plantagenet (by Henry VII.), who was daughter of Edward IV., who was son of Richard, Duke of York, who was son of Anne Mortimer (by Richard Plantagenet, Earl of Cambridge, son of Edmund, Duke of York, fifth son of Edward III.), who was daughter of Roger, Earl of Marche, who was son of Philippe (by Edmund, Earl of Marche), who was daughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III., who was son of Edward II., who was son of Edward I., who was son of Henry III., who was son of John, who was son of Henry II., who was son of Matilda (by Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou), who was daughter of Henry I. (by Matilda of Scotland, sister of Edgar Atheling, and therefore of the Saxon blood royal), who was son of William the Conqueror. Thus Queen Victoria is descended legitimately from the Conqueror, not only through Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward III.'s third son, but also through that monarch's fifth son, Edmund, Duke of York, whose second son, the Earl of Cambridge, married the great-granddaughter of the Duke of Clarence. Had the great struggle of the English throne in the fifteenth century been correctly named, it would stand in history as the contest between the lines of Clarence (not York) and Lancaster. In virtue of her descent from Henry VII., Queen Victoria shares "the aspiring blood of Lancaster," which was so mounting that it brought the worst of woes on England. Henry VII. was the son of Margaret Beaufort (by Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond), who was the daughter of John, Duke of Somerset, who was the son of John, Earl of Somerset, who was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, fourth son of Edward III.; but the mother of the Earl of Somerset was, at the time of his birth, not the wife, but the mistress of the Duke of Lancaster, though he married her late in life, and in various ways obtained the legitimation of the children she had borne him,—facts that could not remove the great fact of their illegitimacy, if marriage is to count for anything and which no good historian has treated with respect. Lord Macaulay calls the Tudors "a line of bastards," and ranks them with the "succession of impostors" set up by the adherents of the White Rose. Froude's great work has created a new interest in the question of the English succession, for he bases his peculiar view of the character of Henry VIII., and his justification of all his acts of heartless tyranny, on the necessities that grew out of that perplexing question, which troubled England for two centuries, thus forming a practical satire on that theory which represents that the peculiar excellence of hereditary monarchy is found in its power to prevent disputes for the possession of government, and to promote the preservation of society's peace,—a theory which has often been thrown into the teeth of republicans, and particularly since the occurrence of our unhappy civil troubles. Yet one would think that Gettysburg and Shiloh were not worse days than Towton and Barnet. Those persons who are interested in the English succession question, and who would see how wide a one it was, and how far and how long and variously it affected the politics of Continental Europe as well as those of England, should read the chapter on the subject in Miss Cooper's "Life and Letters of Arabella Stuart," a learned and lively work, and not the least meritorious of those admirable historical productions which we owe to the genius, the industry, and the honesty of Englishwomen,—Agnes Strickland, Caroline A. Halsted, Lucy Aiken, Mrs. Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper, and others,—whose writings do honor to the sex, and fairly entitle their authors to be ranked with those accomplished ladies of the sixteenth century whose solid attainments have so long been matter of despairing admiration.

14

Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normans, Tom. I. pp. 237, 238.