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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 14

Secret Societies Of The Middle Ages

page 328

Secret Societies Of The Middle Ages.

We cannot better continue to illustrate our subject (for to give a regularly connected history of the Vehmique Association, with the scattered materials at disposal, would be no easy task), than by presenting to our readers some more of the particulars relating to the Vehm, in the work from which we gave some extracts in our last paper; which is indeed, as it purports to be, "a romance of the secret tribunals." Should our space permit it, we also propose to give in this paper (otherwise on a future occasion), portions of what may be called the secret history of a family at whose very name Europe once trembled, some members of whom, if not absolutely members of this formidable association, were, nevertheless, sufficiently influential to secure the assistance and co-operation of some of its most powerful members, which they used for their own purposes in the most unscrupulous manner.

The scene of the present illustration lies in the same locality, and even the same house, which was the scene of the summons of a traveller, in our last paper; viz., the Black Swan Inn, at Kernberg.

A traveller has arrived (as before), who is an old personal friend of the landlord, and known to him from early childhood, when the landlord, Herman, is summoned by one of the chiefs of the Vehm, whom we will call by his own name of Father Anselm, who happens to be in the house, and has recognized the traveller on his arrival.

"Sit down, Herman," said Father Anselm, "you even now received a new guest. I recognized him from the window."

"Does your reverence know him?" exclaimed the landlord, with some manifestation of alarm; for he was by no means at a loss to perceive that there was nothing cordial in Anselm's manner, when speaking of the new arrival.

"Yes, I know him well. He is a malefactor, and his name is on the black page of the registry Vehm. Two months ago, at Vienna he received a summons by means of the cord and the dagger," continued Anslem, in a low but stern tone; "and he did not obey it. He has been judged and condemned by default. Chance has sent him this evening to the place where he must meet his fate. You will place him in the wainscot chamber to-night."

The countenance of the landlord fell. He dared not remonstrate against the command of a free count of the secret tribunal,—his oath of membership bound him to sacrifice all considerations of kindred, relationship, friendship, amity, interest, and love, to the service of the holy Vehm; and he was also well aware that any attempt on his part to save the young man, whom he really liked, would be visited on his own head by the signal vengeance of the bloody league.

He therefore assumed an air of composure as quickly as he could, and bowed his acquiescence to the commands of his chief.

"You may retire," said Father Anselm, "and see that you are cautious in your discourse with this man. Let not a word fall from you that may induce him to suspect my presence in the house."

Herman bowed once more and left the room with a heavy heart. The unhappy man hastened to his own chamber, and, throwing himself upon the bed, reflected on the order which he had just received.

"I have known the youth from childhood," he thought within himself, "and it is cruel that he should find his death beneath my roof. I cannot do it,—and yet I dare not save him; my own life would be the sacrifice! What can I do? If I warn him of his peril, and put him on his guard, I shall be suspected all the same. Woe to the day when I first joined the bloody league! It respects no Christian duties,—has no sympathy with any ties of the heart, however sacred! Alas! what can I do? To save him would be ruin to myself. He must die, then; he must die I and it is my hand that will guide him to destruction!"

He was accordingly obliged to order the guest to be conducted to the wainscot chamber. We need not enter further into other details of the story than those which relate to the Vehmique Association; but in case any of our readers may be anxious to know of the escape of an innocent and independant man (as any one might well be called who slighted a Vehmique summons), even in a work of fiction.—we may inform them of the arrival (after the landlord had retired, and before the intended victim had sought his couch), of another traveller, who paid liberally, and who peremptorily insisted on having a room to himself. The last-arrived traveller was shown, by the servants,—who were unacquainted with certain peculiarities in that apartment which will presently be described, besides those with which the reader is already acquainted,—to the wainscot chamber, and shared the fate intended for the first guest, for whom a temporary couch was hastily made up in the public apartment.

page 329

At midnight, the panel which the reader has already heard of, was cautiously opened, and Father Anselm, with an attendant, passed into the wainscot chamber: that fatal room where many a traveller had received the dread summons of the cord and dagger; and where also many a life had been sacrificed to the sanguinary decrees of the secret tribunal. Not to give the particulars of a revolting murder, we may merely observe that the dagger did its work upon one for whom it was not intended; and that when the mistake was discovered, the chief of the Vehms, after having taken from the person of the deceased some papers of importance, the possession of which happened to be invaluable to him, gave the order that all traces of the deed should disappear in the usual manner.

The landlord obeyed the command with alacrity. He threw all the clothes of the victim upon the bed; and then taking a large key from a bunch that hung at his girlie, he applied it to a lock fixed in one of the bed-posts.

The key turned with a harsh grating noise, and an unseen bolt was shot backwards with a sharp ringing sound. The entire woodwork, which formed what may be called the platform of the bed, turned rapidly round on an axis, while at the same moment, and in obedience to the same skilfully-contrived machinery, a large trap-door opened downwards immediately beneath, so that corpse, mattrass, sheets, blankets, and the garments of the deceased were precipitated into a yawning gulf under that fatal couch. There was a splash of water, and then all was still.

The landlord turned the key back again; the platform of the bed revolved once more on its axis, and returned to its proper horizontal position, and the trap-door closed. Another key opened a large closet communicating with the room; and thence the landlord conveyed another mattrass and fresh sheets and blankets to the couch. These were arranged in such a manner as to have the appearance of having been slept in. Thus all traces of the assassination disappeared, and the landlord now felt relieved from a most oppressive load, for he knew that it would be easy to satisfy his niece in the morning relative to the disappearance of the traveller, by the simple excuse that he had taken his departure at a very early hour.

The contrivance of the fatal couch, adds the author, was by no means singular to the Black Swan. Germany at that time (the date of the narrative is between 1493 and 1517) abounded with taverns whose landlords were devoted to the interests of the bloody league, in which particular chambers were provided with secret avenues of communication, and with beds so fashioned as to afford a facility for effacing all signs of the dark vengeance of that tremendous tribunal.

But it was not intended by the members of the holy Vehm that their victim should escape them, though they had accidentally despatched another person instead of him; and a servant of the Vehm was accordingly sent forward to intercept him on the road, which he had in the course of conversation at the inn declared his intention of taking. An accident, however, deprived the servitor of the Vehm of his life, in the very act of attempting the life of the traveller; and a few words uttered in penitence before he died, a warning against Aselm, and the significant dagger with a cord twisted round the handle, still borne in the hand of the dying man, showed the young man whence this attempt on his life originated—that the vengeance of the Vehmique tribunal was not yet satisfied, and would be satisfied with nothing short of his life.

Another incident in this narrative in connection with the subject of the Vehm, was tha assassination of an imperial courier in 1595, who had left Vienna one evening, charged with despatches for the governor of Laybach. The unfortunate man had been discovered in a wood about five miles from the capital, stabbed to the heart with a dagger, the handle of which was surrounded with a cord. To that cord was fastened a slip of paper, whereon the following words were written, and to which the usual symbolical signature of three daggers was appended:—

"Let all who mediate mischief against the members of the holy Vehm, take warning from the fate of this man! The holy Vehm strikes alike those that plot evil designs against its authority and those that bear the commands of such as so conspire. "†††."

The courier's money and weapons were all safe about his person; but his despatches had disappeared.

That these despatches contained matter in some measure hostile to the Vehm, is evident from the above passage itself, as it is certain that those who would so readily commit a murder, would not hesitate to open imperial despatches by force, as they would attempt any other violent action, if through their extensive ramifications they were not by some means able beforehand to obtain a knowledge of their contents; but it seems to be confirmed by the strange fact that on the morning after the courier had left Vienna, when the emperor awoke, his eyes fell on a dagger sticking in a table near his couch. The weapon had the symbolic cord twined round the handle; and a slip of parchment, fastened to it, contained the single but expressive word, "Beware!"

page 330

These incidents are explained by a conversation which we find in the next chapter, between the chief of the Vehm aforesaid, Father Anselm, and one of the family we referred to in the early part of the paper—no less a person than the celebrated Cæsar Borgia.

"You are determined, then, to leave Vienna to-night," said the latter.

"Yes, my lord," answered the priest, "the German capital is no place for me. A chief of the secret tribunal should never linger in the capital, the place where the power of the Vehm is most abhorred, and where it has least influence."

"And yet you contrived to fill the emperor himself with alarm, oven in the midst of his own palace, and in the privacy of his own chamber," returned the other, laughing heartily.

"Fortunately for the interests of the holy Vehm, my lord," replied the priest, "one of the imperial pages is devoted to us; and it was his hand that planted the sword and dagger on the emperor's table."

"But it was not his hand that stopped the progress of the courier, to the governor of Laybach," said Father Anselm's companion, again laughing.

"No, my lord," answered the priest, solemnly; "that duty was performed by my own hand. The chiefs of the Vehm must, at times—on important occasions—fulfil the functions of subordinates. It was necessary that we should ascertain the precise nature of the commands sent by the emperor to the governor of Laybach; and by waylaying the courier myself, I incurred no risk of losing those important documents of which he was the bearer. We have thereby discovered that the governor was instructed to inundate the defiles of the Julian Alps with his troops; and the map furnished him by this means would have taught him how to plant his forces in such points that all supplies of provisions would have been cut off, and the convent, impregnable as it is to an entire army, would be compelled to yield to famine."

"And are you determined that your adherents shall abandon the convent altogether?"

"No, my lord; but by the steps which I have taken—by killing the courier, and paralyzing tae energies of the emperor for at least a few days, by means of that warning symbol of the sword and dagger, I have gained time for our two dependents who effected their escape from the imperial prison last night to reach the convent, and lay in provisions necessary to enable the place to stand a siege that may weary out the patience of the Governor of Laybach; and within a couple of hours I shall also be pursuing the path towards Carniola."*

"And, to-morrow, I shall quit Vienna with my sister," said the priest's companion. "Fortunate was it for Walstein (one of the dependents of the Vehm who had escaped from prison), that private affairs of our own happened to bring us, under fictitious names, to this city at a moment when his folly had involved him in such a serious embarrassment. I have, however, often smiled at the impudence of the man, in availing himself of his extraordinary likeness to a certain baron, to personate him, and thus obtain possession of his property."

"And I, my lord, have never forgiven him, for keeping all that fortune to himself," was the laconic answer of the priest. "Moreover, that very imposition has led, by a chain of circumstances, to the release of the baron, and whatever were the motives of your lordship and her highness, your sister, for consigning him to close and perpetual imprisonment—"

"Have I not before informed you?" interrupted Cæsar, "that this baron penetrated one evening into our mansion at Venice when we were residing there for a few weeks under a strict incognito, while we plotted certain schemes, which raised my father to his present eminence: this baron, I say, penetrated into our mansion, and there beheld the interior of a particular chamber, with whose secrets you are not unaquainted. Walstein was in the house at the time, and he had just been giving an account of his former adventures, and of his intimacy with that identical baron, when my sister suddenly remembered that the door of the secret chamber had been unlocked. She and Walstein proceeded thither, for Walstein was anxious to possess a bottle of acqua Cantarella, always an useful drug for those who serve our family. Scarcely had they reached the door, when they perceived a person in the room. Walstein instantly retreated; and my sister advanced to demand an explanation of the intruder. She was immediately struck by his likeness to Walstein, and was therefore not greatly astonished when he informed her that he was in fact the very baron of whom Walstein had been previously speaking. He gave an explanation of his presence in that room, which might, or might not, be a correct one. It was certainly true that my mother had been chastising a female dependent, for you

* Our readers may wonder at first in what manner a great deal of this narrative may be connected with the Vehm, no less than feel no inconsiderable amount of surprise at the narrative itself. We can answer them, that this connection, which will be fully explained, is closer than may appear immediately, and that the circumstances mentioned are historical facts,

Rosa Vanozza.

page 331 know, holy father, that the Spanish blood of my maternal parent frequently boils o a temperature which overpowers her patience; and the baron alleged that the screans of some women in distress had led him into the house. Now, surrounded with spies a we were at that time, and watched by so many enemies who were all jealous and suspicious not only of my father, but of all our family, it was natural that we should adopt preautionary measures. Thus it was that my sister and myself instructed Walstein to conign the baron to your custody in the convent: but we did not desire him to take advantae of his accidental likeness to personate his lordship in Vienna," added the priest's compaion, laughing.

"Your lordship never explained to me so fully the reasons of the baron's captivty," observed the priest. "But I now perfectly understand them. At the time the bron penetrated into the penetralia of your mansion at Venice, the interests of your family might have been seriously compromised by the revelation of what he had seen there.'

"Assuredly, father, and but that my sister would not consent that we should subject him to the penalty of the cord and dagger, never would he have quitted that louse alive after having beheld the mysteries of that chamber, although, for our safety she agred to his perpetual captivity. Thus a woman's caprice spared him, and he is new at large to publish all he knows—as he did yesterday at the tribunal—of the secret chamber."

"The cord and dagger can reach him still, my lord," said the priest, with a significant glance.

"No, let him live," was the reply. He is totally unaware of the names of those who occupied the house wherein he beheld such objects; and moreover," added the speaker, proudly, "our house is now too powerful, too highly placed, to care about such revelations. No, I say, let him live."

"As your lordship pleases," was the meek reply. "I have received too many benefits at the hands of your lordship's family to disobey a command from your lordship's lips."

There are now the following points to be explained to the reader, the history of the Borgia family, the mysteries of the secret chamber, and the nature of the stronghold of the Vehm tribunal above referred to.

We take the subject of the Borgia family first; and cannot better commence the history of this extraordinary house than by describing the election of its head Roderic, or Roderic Borgia, commonly known as Alexander VI., to the high office of pope. The manner of electing a pope has remained unchanged for centuries; and as the same ceremonies are always observed, we cannot lay before our readers a better or more elegantly written account than that of Cardinal Wiseman, of the election of Pope Leo the twelfth.*

"The interval between the close of one pontificate and the commencement of another," says the cardinal, "is a period of some excitement, and necessarily of much anxiety. There is no interregnum in successive monarchy; but in elective monarchy, and in the only one surviving in Europe, there is of course a space of provisional arrangements, foreseen and predisposed. Time is required for the electors to assemble from distant provinces, or even foreign countries; and this is occupied in paying the last tribute of respect and affection to the departed Pontiff. His body is embalmed, clothed in the robes of his office, and laid on a coach of state, within one of the chapels of St. Peter. These preliminaries occupy three days; during which rises, as if by magic, or from the crypts below, an immense catafalque—a colossal architectural structure—which fills the nave of that basilica, illustrated by inscriptions, and adorned by statuary. Before this huge monument, for nine days, funeral rites are performed, closed by a funeral oration. The body of the last pope, has a uniform resting place in St. Peter's. A plain sarcophagus, of marble stucco, will be there seen, though hardly noticed, by the traveller, over a door beside the choir, on which is simply painted the title of the last pontiff. On the death of his successor it is broken down at the top, the coffin is removed to the under-church, and that of the new claimant for repose is substituted for it. This change takes place late in the evening, and is considered private.

"In the afternoon of the last day of the novendiali as they are called, the cardinals assemble in a church near the Quirinal palace, and walk thence in procession, accompanied by their conclavisti, a secretary, a chaplain, and a servant or two, to the gate of that royal residence, in which one will remain as master. of course the hill is crowded by persons lining the avenue kept open for the procession. Cardinals never before seen by them, or not for many years, pass before them; eager eyes scan and measure them, and try to conjecture, from fancied omens in eye, or figure, or expression, who will be shortly the sovereign of their fair city. They all enter equal over the threshold of that gate; perhaps to-morrow one will sit enthroned, one will be sovereign, and the others his subjects.

* Recollecions of the Last Four Popes, p. 209.

Two persons allowed to each during the conclave.

page 332 This is a singular and a deeply interesting moment, a scene not easily forgotten. The conclave, as the assembled body of cardinals are called only when "locked up together" for the election of a Pope (when assembled for other purposes they are called a consistory), used formerly to take place in the Vatican, but has been subsequently held in the Quirinal Palace. This noble building, known by the name of Monte Cavallo, consists of a large quadrangle, round which run the papal apartments. From this stretches out, the length of a whole street, an immense wing, divided in its two upper floors into a great number of small but complete suites of apartments, occupied permanently or occasionally by persons attached to the court.

During conclave these are allotted, literally so, to the Cardinals, each of whom lives apart with his attendants. His food is brought daily from his own house, and is overhauled and delivered to him in the shape of "broken victuals," by the watchful guardians of the turns and lattices, through which alone anything, even conversation, can penetrate into the seclusion of that retreat. For a few hours the first evening the doors are left open, and the nobility, the diplomatic body, and in fact all presentable persons may roam from cell to cell, paying a brief compliment to its occupant, perhaps speaking the same good wishes to fifty which they know can only be accomplished in one. After that, all is closed; a wicket is left open for any cardinal to enter who has not yet arrived; but every aperture is jealously guarded by faithful janitors, judges, and prelates, of various tribunals, who relieve one another. Every letter even is opened and read, so that no communication may be held with the outer world. The very street on which the wing of the conclave looks, is barricaded, and guarded by a picquet at each end; and as, fortunately, there are no private residences opposite, no inconvenience is thereby caused."

X.