Originally published in Howitt's Journal (William Lovett) vol.1 #20 (15 May 1847).
The heir apparent to the throne, namely, the eldest son of the Margrave Frederick, died (during the lifetime of his father) a violent death, while on a journey to the north, in the year 1801. The carriage was upset, and his neck was broken. He left, however, a son, Karl, who succeeded on the death of his grandfather in 1811. This was the husband of Stephanie, whom he married in 1806. Stephanie, now in advanced age, is esteemed a lady of fascinating manners, full of intellect and goodness of heart; but in the flower of her youth she united in herself all which constitutes the perfect charm of a young Frenchwoman. Notwithstanding, for a long time she deigned not to confer on her husband a word or look. An evil demon appeared to stand between them, and it did stand between them; who it was we shall anon see. Sound sense and natural goodness, however, finally triumphed; the married pair discovered the truth, and became attached to each other. Their eldest child was the Princess Louise, who was born in 1811. Their marriage seemed to promise to become one of the happiest in the world, but the evil demon again presented itself. Karl was amiable, but weak; a knot of dissipated people acquired an influence over him; he was regularly ruined, and died of exhaustion in the thirtieth year of his life. He had had in the whole five children: three princesses, who still live; and two princes, one born in September, 1812, who died (?) in a few weeks; the other born in 1816, who died in the following year. Karl, therefore, left no male heir; and, at his death, who succeeded to the throne?—The evil genius of his father—his father's brother Ludwig, and that after the next elder brother, the Margrave Frederick, had died in the preceding year 1817, and died, too, of a sudden death.
Since, then, this Grand-Duke Ludwig, the predecessor of the present reigning grand-duke, is the principal figure in the infernal picture that we now unroll, it is necessary in a few words to denote his character. Possessing a powerful constitution, he was full of vehement and contradictory passions. He was dissolute to the highest degree, irreconcilable in his hatred, constant in friendship—or more properly, grateful for personal services rendered him, which were truly of a very dubious kind, consisting in procuration and base adulation—arbitrary and despotic, and yet, so able, that perhaps never was there a prince who could rely so unconditionally on the devotion of his soldiers; at a signal from him they would have fired on father and mother. He was, moreover, persevering and determined in his resolves and opinions, and, finally, not wanting in personal courage, to which he added tolerable knowledge of military affairs.
Let us now take a retrospective review of the whole succession of deaths which must happen, in order to open to him the way to the throne; and we find his eldest brother, who was killed by the overturning of his carriage; his next elder brother, who also died a sudden death; his brother's son, who died in the bloom of his years; and the two male children of this nephew, who both perished in their infancy.
Without allowing ourselves to speculate how far these circumstances were ordered or effected by a human hand, since the inquiry is impossible, so much is certain, he was the murderer of his nephew, the murderer of Karl.
At the time of the Congress of Vienna, a rumour was abroad that he had procured poison to be given him in Vienna; and the suicide of Karl's valet which took place in that city, and the cause of which never could be discovered, was soon connected with it in the public mind, and regarded as the consequence of the stings of conscience. Yet Karl died not till 1818: it did, indeed, appear as if his health had suffered a shock since his sojourn in Vienna; yet we willingly admit that Karl died in direct consequence of his debaucheries; but, if we cast a glance at the loose companions who seduced him into these disgraceful excesses, we at once discover none but people who, after the death of the nephew, became the particular favourites of the uncle.
One of these, Von Gensau, colonel of the guards, led a life of constant scandal, contracted false debts, embezzled even fees belonging to the war-office, for which a poor devil of the name of Bernauer, who served both gentlemen as secretary, soon after the accession of the present grand-duke, was arrested, and for two years continued under trial at Carlsruhe. But Ludwig was too shrewd, and too zealous an observer—for he acquainted himself with the whole gossip of the city, and knew it all—for the debaucheries of his colonel of guards to escape him, which the very children in the streets were familiar with, and yet he never brought him to account for them. Was there a criminal secret between the two—the cement of this enduring connexion? The reward for having ministered diligently to the excesses of the nephew, which exhausted his strength? Was there a secret between them? Probably there was more than one!
Another favourite of the Grand-Duke Ludwig was the Major Hennehofer, in whom many believe that they see the murderer of Caspar Hauser. This man has, indeed, talent, but unrestrained by principle, and capable of anything. He made a strikingly rapid career in Germany. The war of 1813 found him a commissary, if I mistake not, at Gernsbach. He was about the person of Karl, as a ranger; but under Ludwig he rose speedily to the rank of Minister of Foreign Affairs. Those must have been important services which were rewarded with so rapid an advancement. Was he also in the secret?
The grand-duke openly took from the theatre a dancer, Mademoiselle Werner: he had two children by her, and afterwards created her Countess of Langenstein, Extensive and various as were his intrigues, to this lady he showed an unvarying constancy: he visited her every day, reposed in her the most unbounded confidence, and left her at his death the bulk of his private property, which was considerable. Near the residence of this Mademoiselle Werner was that of the park-ranger Haüser, who had earlier been chamberlain to Ludwig of Baden, still stood in high favour with him, and whose daughter daily visited her neighbour, where she often saw the grand-duke too. Both Mademoiselle Werner and the daughter of the park-ranger are good, plain, unpretending women, of the middle class, to whom people willingly listen when they talk out of their own heads, or become the echoes of persons of fashion. In this way, on one occasion came flying to me a feather, which once hung in the pinion of one of the Haüser family.
The conversation was of Hennehofer; of his brilliant career; and whether, in case of a change in the government, he might not be a loser. "By no means," was the answer, "he knows too much." That much could not have grown in her garden; it was evidently the observation of the ruler, who had let it fall in confidential talk with his mistress. I could well comprehend on what occasion the grand-duke might have dropped this expression. Major Hennehofer stood in connexion with Mademoiselle Werner, he was even about to marry her sister; he had no private property; nothing but his pay. In the intimate conversations concerning this marriage, in which the grand-duke took a lively interest, and which he particularly desired, it was quite in character that the princely favourite or her sister, who was looking for a secure provision, should observe to the duke that the future bridegroom depended entirely on his pay, and might lose it under a successor. To which the reply was the requisite consolation, "He is indispensable to the successor--he knows too much." But what did he know?
Perhaps it was how both the heirs male had perished so speedily while the sisters all remained alive. The people from the first regarded the affair as very striking, and said all sorts of things about it: the deaths were also attended with truly extraordinary circumstances.
Before the death of each of the princes appeared the white lady. This white lady, as every one knows, bestowed formerly, and for ages, her visits on many of the great families of Germany, and each appearance was the herald of death. In the Castle of Blankenburg in the Hartz country, you may see a very striking full-length portrait of her. The white lady appeared at the cradle of the princes successively, bowed herself in grief over it, and the terrified nurses fled away.
I have read with much pleasure the stories of the white lady and of the banshee, in the Irish popular legends; but as all these bore an ancient date, I had drawn the conclusion that the white lady had long since vanished, and appeared no more. I deduce, therefore, from this present fact, another meaning, one which certain persons in Carlsruhe adopted, that the white lady was no other than the Reichsgräfin, formerly maid of honour, Geyer von Geyersberg, the mother of the present grand-duke, and that she destroyed the children.
This woman must have been an unnatural monster towards her own children. She was recklessly extravagant and irregular in her life; credit, she had none amongst the rich, to whom she was too well known; her agents went continually about amongst the dwellings of the poor, and exacted from them, under menaces and the most deceitful promises, their little savings for their own necessities.—She is dead, but curses and imprecations on her memory daily resound around her grave, from thousands of those whose families she reduced to poverty, or whose poverty she aggravated to ruin. Her eldest son is now Grand-Duke of Baden; her two other sons are Margraves of Baden, and all three are very rich; yet it has occurred to none of them to rescue the memory of their mother! They left her, during the latter years of her life, in a condition of indigence and destitution, which she endeavoured to escape by compelling from widows and orphans their last mites: and now that she is in her grave, they will not, by a small part of their superfluous wealth, purchase her an exemption from the curses of these unhappy ones! When the mother appears so infamous to her own children, what shall we think of her? We must believe everything, the moment that we can be shown what interest she could have to become the accursed work-tool of the murder in question.
We have already said, that the Margraf Karl Frederick, at an advanced age, contracted a left-handed marriage with the maid of honour, Mademoiselle Geyer von Geyersberg, who was very young, and she bore the margraf particularly strong and healthy children. The courtiers made remarks thereon, and plenty of people set it down to their own satisfaction, that the real father of these children was no other than their own half-brother, the evil demon of our history, Ludwig of Baden; and certainly he who could seduce his father's wife to a crime of this kind, could easily lead her to the infinitely lesser sins of stealing or smothering other people's children. But if, indeed, these partly worn-out rumours were based on fact, there are other mysterious circumstances in the history of Ludwig, which can only be explained by the intimate relation between father and son, between a man and his successor.
When Ludwig ascended the throne, he was yet a vigorous man. He had two healthy and strong children by his mistress the Gräfin Langenstein; he was not a man to be dreaming of dying soon; he was ambitious to the highest degree; why then did it never occur to him to marry, that he might be able to leave his throne to his own children—that throne, which, according to all appearances, he had grasped only by a whole series of crimes? The most powerful reasons of state must indeed urge upon him the policy of hastening such a marriage.
Between the courts of Bavaria and Baden, there existed and still exist the most serious and earnestly contested claims to the possession of the Pfalz, the richest and most beautiful portion of Baden. After the death of the Grand-Duke Ludwig, there remained none of the family of the Margrave Karl Frederick, except the children of the Reichsgräfin von Hochberg, i.e. Madam Geyer von Geyersberg, who had been so created. But these were the fruit of a left-handed marriage, i.e. of a marriage in which the children inherited the quality, not of the father, but of the mother only. Thus the ruling family legally expired with Ludwig of Baden; and Bavaria might now make good its claims on the Pfalz, and Austria its claims on the Breisgau, which, in consequence of the French Revolution, had been given to Baden, at the expense of Bavaria. It became doubtful even whether the Reichsgräfin Hochberg could establish the claims of her children to the old hereditary portion of Baden which had for centuries belonged to the house.
There were stupendous difficulties in these respects to surmount. The congress of Aix-la-Chapelle must declare the Graf von Hochberg capable of succeeding; and the whole influence of Alexander, the Emperor of Russia, who had married a princess of Baden, was necessary to elicit this declaration; which, however, after all, could not be elicited further than that the Hochberg family, if entitled to succeed at all, was entitled to succeed only to the original hereditary lands of the Margrave of Baden. It became necessary to make many journeys to all the courts of Europe; the Margrave Wilhelm, brother of the present grand-duke, engaged in the time of Charles X. to support the French court, and continued some months in Paris. There was a mass of memorials written and dispersed amongst the ruling powers. The Baden Chamber of Deputies was called on time after time to declare that the whole Grand Duchy of Baden was one and indivisible. A thousand other things were done and attempted; and yet, notwithstanding all this, the Court of Bavaria has never resigned its claims to the Pfalz, and these affairs at the present hour are by no means decided.
Now all these difficulties were at once at an end, had Ludwig early married, and had legitimate male heirs. Why then did he not marry immediately on coming to the throne? Why did he not marry long before, as the creeping disease of his nephew had for years plainly opened to his view the certainty of his succession? Could it be that he had brought the Reichsgräfin to act the white lady, and to the pitch of infanticide, by the promise of setting her own children—his own children—on the throne? If he gave such a promise, he was the man to keep it. But if he gave no such promise, or were no such man, was he not in the hands of the participator of his crime, and could she not come forward with this menace: "Remember the Bohemian Forest?[1] keep faith with us, or we will discover all!" Should he free himself from this by fresh murders? He was weary of murder, and in his wild doings towards the end of his life, many saw only his violent efforts to drown the irrepressible reproaches of his conscience.
But if he did not revolt from recent murder, were not the confidants perhaps too many? Could not these hold, in preparation for the worst chance, a written disclosure for foreign countries? it is certainly true that Ludwig of Baden never appeared to regard his heir to the throne but with a degree of aversion; but the case is very common, that the reigning father does not love his successor, who seems to await his end, and every day to pray for his life to be shortened. Ludwig was, moreover, sagacious, and must thoroughly perceive the pitiful want of character and the intellectual insignificance of his successor, who was not the man for him. Or was there engraven in his expressionless countenance, palpable to his eye, a train of crimes bey made his hair stand on end, his blood run ice-cold?
But did he really feel the pangs of an evil conscience? In his last years he had about him a dissolute, but at the same time bigoted and ignorant priest of the name of Engesser, who possessed an unlimited influence over him, an influence which he shared only with the aforesaid Hennehofer. These two understood each other admirably. Engesser, at the time that he contrived to attract the eye of Ludwig, was simply a parish priest. In little more than the space of a year, he rose to be the head of a ministerial department; but, in fact, he was prime minister, at whose nod everything gave way. Besides this, the grand-duke, who was otherwise avaricious, lavished upon him houses and money. Did the Protestant but aged prince feel a necessity to shrive himself before the Catholic priest? Spite of his stupidity he was Jesuit enough to appease the conscience of the ruler with Catholic grounds of consolation. The priest still lives, and is become a rich man.
To all these rumours there is a consideration on the other side to be weighed, and it is important. If these rumours could spread themselves, and maintain themselves till now, had it been only in a confined circle, how did it happen that Karl of Baden, and his intellectual wife, against whom, and whose children, these hellish plans were directed, had no suspicion of them? Who knows? perhaps they had more—perhaps they had certainty.
LUDWIG WAS BANISHED AT THE COMMAND OF THE GRAND-DUKE KARL TO HIS ESTATE, AND A GOOD MANY OTHER PERSONS AT THE SAME TIME.
Nothing more precise ever reached the public regarding this measure, than that a political crime was laid to his charge, a conspiracy to hurl Karl from the throne, to which, in fact, Ludwig climbed out of his very banishment. The crime, and cause of abhorrence, must have been of no ordinary dye, which induced the nephew, for the honour of the family, to conceal it in a mysterious darkness. And if injustice were on this occasion done to Ludwig, why have none of the participators in it complained of it; Ludwig being upon the throne, and having raised them every one into places of high trust around him? They continued dumb, as before.
But of whatever kind these crimes were, how do they connect themselves with the history of Hauser?
His apparent age tallied exactly with the elder of the young princes who perished or were conveyed away, who was born at the end of 1812, and his first appearnce with the termination of the reign of Ludwig.
His birth occurred at an agitated period. His father made the campaign in 1813 in France; afterwards he went to Vienna; and his absence gave to his enemies opportunity enough to carry off the child, and to take the necessary measures for its concealment, when the white lady brought under her veil a dead child to exchange for the living one, which, according to the rumour, was strangled.
At the ascension of Leopold, the present grand-duke, to the throne, there was again a strange but general report through Carlsruhe, that the ghost of a murdered prince had appeared to him as he went through the vaults of the palace. Did some one of those in the secret blab in this shape? In a censor-ridden country this is the only way in which a weary conscience can relieve itself. It cannot speak out, but it can half speak.
But if Hauser was the son of Karl of Baden, and Ludwig of Baden, the uncle, was the cause of his incarceration, who was then the cause of his murder? God knows! I know only this,—that the present Grand-Duke Leopold, in whose time the murder happened, is called the friend of the middle class, and is universally beloved by his subjects—for so we read very often in the Carlsruhe Court Journal.
After Leopold's accession to the government, Engesser and Hennehofer retained for a while their posts. Certain passages in the "Hochwüchter," to which I alluded in my preface, made, however, such a scandal regarding the doings of these two gentlemen, that they were both removed; but it was done very gently, and Hennehofer, it is said, will one day be reinstated.—He knows too much!
Well, I have related only surmises, and made thence only dubious deductions: they of whom I have spoken are answerable to no tribunal which can put these surmises to the proof.
These words are not mine. My passions as a republican might have led me wrong, and have given an importance to these matters which they might not deserve. But the words are those of an unimpassioned man; of a sober criminal judge, Feuerbach, to whom the king of Bavaria deputed the inquiry concerning Caspar Hauser, and who printed them in the report of the inquiry thus:—"There are circles of human society into which the arm of justice dares not penetrate."
As the result of my material towards the history of Baden, the following important queries particularly present themselves:—
1. Did Karl actually begin to sicken at the Congress of Vienna?
2. Does the murder of his chamberlain stand connected with that circumstance, or with that of the murder of the former prince, which had occurred before?
3. Have people seen the white lady, who are yet still living?
4. Had the ranger Hennehofer already been connected with the successor of Ludwig?
5. Why did he make so rapid a career of advancement?
6. How great is the sum which Engesser received from Ludwig? and how can such an endowment be explained?
7. Why was Ludwig banished to his estate? and what ware those who were banished with him charged with?
8. In the features of Caspar Hauser is there not an obvious likeness to Karl of Baden, especially in the lower part of the face?
9. For some time before the appearance of Caspar Hauser there came every five days a man into his cell, who taught him to write and read. Did any confidant of Ludwig of Baden,—for instance, Hennehofer,—make such regular journeys?
To these there might be added another query, out of the political circumstances which arose on Caspar's death:—
10. Was the Ritter von Lange, who is by no means an ass in other respects, and who asserts in the public prints that Caspar Hauser destroyed himself on speculation,—was this man before in debt and difficulties—and is he so no longer?—or has his property since then received a remarkable augmentation?
The answer to these queries would solve a multitude of mysteries.
To this little book is added this:—
POSTSCRIPT.
I wrote the above in a kind of compulsory solitude, without books or other means of assistance than a copy of Schiller's "Robbers," and a little table of the genealogy of the House of Baden, which I owed to the care of an acquaintance. In other circumstances my details might have been richer. At this moment, the printing being finished, there comes to my hands something, which, for the sake of completeness, I add. The Frankfort Journal of the 4th of February states that:—
"A certain Herr Cuno, Royal Economy Counsellor of Prussia, writes from Ratibor to the Magdeburg Gazette of the 9th of February, 1834, a letter, in which he says, that in the Vossich Gazette of November the 16th, 1816, No. 138, stands this communication:—
"Paris, 6th Nov. 1816.
"A boatman of Gross-Kemps found, on the 23rd of October, a bottle swimming in the Rhine, containing a paper with this passage in Latin:—Cuicunque qui hane epistolam inveniet. Sum captivus in carcere apud Lauffenburg juncta Rheni flumen; meum carcer est subterraneum, nec novit locum ille qui nune solio meo potitus est. Non plus possum scribere, quia sedulo et crudeliter custoditus sum.
"S. Hanes Spranciò.
To him who shall find this letter. I lie in a dungeon at Lauffenburg, on the Rhine; my subterranean prison is unknown to him who now sits on my throne. I can write no more because I am strictly and severely watched.
(To be continued.)
1. See Schiller's "Robbers."