Part 16

the capture of which it was founded, in 1704. His father, Major Lacy, dying while he was yet an infant, his mother married an officer of the Brussels Regiment of infantry in the service of Charles III. Young Louis, at the early age of nine years, entered this corps as a cadet, with his stepfather, and accompanied it to Puerto Rico, one of the Spanish West India islands, which was used then as a penal colony; it had been so for two centuries before. Thus a strong garrison was maintained at the capital, San Juan de Puerto Rico.

As he grew older, Lacy showed so decided a vocation for the life of a soldier, that on his return to Spain, in 1789, Charles IV. removed him into the Ulster Regiment, among the gallant Irishmen of which his family name was held in high veneration; and in that battalion of exiles he obtained a company in 1794.

In that year, when the French Republican forces invaded Spain, and commenced those operations which ended in the capture of Fontarabia and San Sebastian, Lacy was, with the regiment of Ulster, attached to the army of Catalonia, and fighting against them. The French were 40,000 strong, the Spaniards only 20,000.

In Catalonia their progress was small; but in Guipuzcoa many places of importance fell into their hands; for the Court, languid and slow in all its warlike operations, opposed to them forces of inferior strength, and unhappily more accustomed to defeat than victory. Bellegarde was besieged by the French, who defeated the Spaniards before it; yet its commandant, the Marquis de Vallesantero, held out bravely. On the shores of the Bay of Biscay the arms of the invaders were successful; they made themselves masters of Passages, and the strong old castle of San Sebastian; they penetrated as far as Tolosa, assaulted Placentia, and besieged Pampeluna. Lacy is recorded as having personally and particularly signalized himself in battle against the French on the 5th of February, and the 5th, 16th, and 25th days of June, 1794; and to these circumstances their own military historians bear honourable testimony.

Driven to extremities, Bellegarde surrendered on the 17th of September; and the brave Conde de la Union, after making a desperate and futile attempt to save it, fell in battle for his country, on the heights of Figueras, where 9000 Spaniards and 171 pieces of cannon were taken. The fall of Rosas followed, and the Court of Madrid trembled for the safety of the Catalonian coast. But the war was ended in the following year by the peace of Basle; and up to that period Lacy served, with the Regiment of Ulster, with honourable distinction, and attained great experience in the art of war--that arduous profession to which all the exiles of his family had so successfully and especially dedicated their lives.

In December, 1795, he embarked with his regiment for the Canary Islands. While there he unfortunately had a love intrigue with a young Spanish lady, of great personal attractions; and in gaining her favour, won, also, the enmity of the governor and captain-general of the colony, who, by ill-luck, proved to be his rival. Enraged by the success of the handsome Lacy, the proud and revengeful Spaniard was so weak and unjust as to exile him from his regiment and the society of his companions in arms, by banishing him to Ferro, one of the smallest and most westerly of the Canary Islands. An arid and barren place, it is a mere mountain pass, composed of dark grey land, dotted here and there by sombre bushes.

Indignant at such arbitrary treatment, Louis Lacy wrote bitter and fiery letters to the captain-general, who made him a prisoner, and brought him before a _Consijo de Guerra_, or court-martial, by sentence of which he was condemned to imprisonment as one labouring under mental alienation, and, after all his gallant services, was deprived of his commission.

After a time he was permitted to return to Spain, and was sent to Cadiz _en retrait_.

At that time Spain, having made peace with France, was at war with John VI. of Portugal. This contest was productive of no important event, and was terminated in 1801. Lacy arrived in Europe just as the last campaign was opened against the Portuguese; and hearing of it, he vainly solicited from the government of Charles IV. the honour of being permitted to serve in the Spanish army as a simple grenadier; but the mal-influence of his enemy, the Governor of the Canaries, still followed him, and this humble request was refused him. Poor Lacy, in bitterness of spirit and almost without a coin in his purse, resolved to push his fortunes elsewhere. He wandered on foot through the Peninsula, crossed the Pyrenees, and, like an humble wayfaring pedestrian, passed through France, and arrived at the town of Boulogne-sur-mer in October, 1803, when Bonaparte was assembling his great army for the invasion of Britain.

Finding himself destitute, and without resources, Lacy enlisted in the 6th Regiment of light infantry of the French line, as a private soldier; but his previous military knowledge, which was soon discovered by his comrades and officers, obtained for him, in one month, the rank of sergeant. About the same time General Clarke (who was afterwards, in 1809, created Duc de Feltre) having heard of him, related the history of Lacy, of his father and uncle, to the Emperor Napoleon. Struck by a narrative so singular, Napoleon sent for the sergeant, and being charmed by his manner and bearing, in virtue of the rank he had previously held, generously gave him the commission of captain in the Irish Legion, which was then being organized at Morlaix, under Arthur O'Connor, for the service of France. General Clarke, Minister of War under Napoleon, being of Irish descent, had the idea of gaining over some of the old Irish aristocracy; and Nadgett, another Irishman in the Foreign Office, had a scheme for enlisting Irish prisoners in the French prisons; a scheme which proved, however, unsuccessful. Arthur O'Connor had been M.P. for Philipstown, but rebelled in 1798, and after being imprisoned at Dublin, and tried for high treason at Maidstone, he was acquitted. In France he became a general, married the daughter of the Marquis de Condorcet, and died at Bignon in 1852.

From Morlaix Lacy marched with his regiment to Quimper-Corentin, an old manufacturing town in the departement of Finisterre; and while there became acquainted with a pretty French girl, Mademoiselle Guermer, to whom he became attached, and whom he married, in June, 1806, although her parents--old royalists probably--were bitterly opposed to her espousing a soldier of fortune in the Legion of Exiles.

Lacy was then in his thirty-first year.

Three days afterwards the Irish Legion marched for Antwerp, and he took his wife with him. From Antwerp the Irish went to the pestilential Isle of Walcheren; there also his young wife accompanied him, and he obtained a majority.

In 1807, he was appointed _Chef-du-Battailon_ of the Irish attached to the army which Murat, Grand Duke of Berg, was to command in Spain, for the purpose of accomplishing Bonaparte's unjustifiable scheme of usurpation and conquest.

Lacy's generous mind became deeply agitated at the prospect of being obliged to serve against that nation among whom his exiled family had found a home; and, notwithstanding the bitterness yet rankling in his mind against those who had treated him so ill in Spain, and who had dismissed him from the Regiment of Ulster, he determined not to draw a sword against the country of his father's adoption, and with sorrow sent his young wife, with their infant son, back to her family at Quimper, there to await the settlement of the Peninsular affairs. As _Chef-du-Battailon_, he still remained with the army which crossed the Pyrenees, in virtue of the base conspiracy of the Escurial, and which marched unmolested through the barrier-towns of San Sebastian, Figueras, Pampeluna, and Barcelona, in the spring of 1808; and in the summer of that year he found himself with the French army at Madrid.

The events of the 2nd of May--the decoying of the Royal Family to Bayonne by Bonaparte--their compulsory renunciation of the Spanish crown--and other dark transactions, decided the noble Lacy on the course he should pursue. He relinquished his command of the Irish, and quietly quitting the capital, surrendered himself a prisoner of war to the venerable Spanish general, Don Gregorio de la Cuesta, who, in his seventieth year, still held the command of the forces to which Ferdinand VII. had appointed him, as Captain-General of Castile and Leon.

Struck with the story and magnanimity of Lacy, and revering his character, Cuesta, the last of the old Spanish cavaliers, appointed him at once Lieutenant-Colonel-Commandant of the Battalion of Ledesma, which had been raised in the small province of that name, near Salamanca; and he gave all his energy and talent to discipline this regiment. For now Spain had risen bravely against the invaders, and the sturdy Asturians and Galicians, under Don Joachim Blake, a young officer of Irish parentage, had commenced the War of Independence. In all the operations of the Spaniards Lacy fought gallantly, at the head of his new regiment; but more particularly at Logrono, in Old Castile, and on the retreat to the Ebro, at Guadalaxara, thirty-two miles from Madrid; after the betrayal of which, the Spanish vanguard, which, under Venegas, had saved the army at Buvierca, by so bravely defending the pass, entered the city on the night of the 4th of December, 1809. The battalions (_tercios_) "of Ledesma and Salamanca, under Don Louis Lacy and Don Alexandro de Hore," skirmished for three hours with the French that night, on the banks of the Henares; but after a desperate encounter, the flower of the Spanish troops had to retire before them.

He was now appointed Colonel of the Burgos Regiment of Infantry; and in the same year defended several defiles of the Sierra Morena--that long, steep chain of mountains which the novel of Cervantes (more even than the valour of his countrymen) has made famous in Europe, and which divides Andalusia from New Castile. At Toralva he surprised and captured 3000 French cavalry, and afterwards took command of the Spanish advanced guard, with the rank of Brigadier-General.

He distinguished himself again at Cuesta della Reyna, and at the beautiful old town of Aranjuez. While Venegas occupied it, he despatched Lacy with a division to drive the enemy, 2000 strong, out of Toledo, which (as he did not wish to destroy the houses from whence they fired upon him, as it was a Spanish town) did not succeed. He next occupied Puente Larga on the Zarama, which was crossed by the foe; and the Spanish general, fearing his retreat would be cut off, ordered Lacy to destroy the Queen's Bridge, and rejoin him, which he skilfully achieved; but not before the enemy's cavalry from Cuesta della Reyna had attacked him, and driven his troops to some heights above the river, the passage of which he left Don Luis Riguelmo to defend, with three battalions and four field-pieces. He was present, also, at the engagements at Almonacid de Zoreta, on the left bank of the Tagus, where, for nine consecutive hours, he remained under fire at the head of his brigade, and where 4000 Spaniards fell; and again he met the French at the pass of Despina Perros, and in the unfortunate battle of Ocana, where Venegas, in his chivalric attempt to save his friends, the people of La Mancha, rushed, with his cavalry only, on a force consisting of 5000 foot and 800 horse, and was defeated with great loss on the 19th November, 1809.

The repeated reverses of the Spaniards after the battles of Ocana and Medellin (which was lost solely by the indecision of Don Francisco de Eguia), forced Brigadier Lacy to retire into Cadiz, where, as a reward for his services, he was named successively, Sub-Inspector, Major-General, _Mariscial de Campo_, and Commander of the Isle de Leon, which is a triangular tract of ground separated from the mainland by the river of San Pedro. The river side was strongly fortified, and the channel flanked by batteries; the whole position, as it contained 50,000 inhabitants, was one of great trust and importance. Here he directed the increase of the fortifications, and commanded in many of those desperate and sanguinary sorties which were made against the enemy, who boasted that the _Insurrection_ was confined to this small corner of conquered Spain. And now ensued the long blockade, which was not raised until the British won the battle of Salamanca, in 1812.

On the 5th of May, 1811, Lacy took an active part in the battle of Chiclana, which was fought on the eastern bank of the channel of San Pedro, and immediately opposite the Isle de Leon. The brave defence at Cadiz greatly encouraged the Spaniards elsewhere.

In June he was appointed Commandant-General of Catalonia; but, unfortunately, was unable to prevent the ancient seaport of Tarragona from falling into the hands of the French. Indefatigable and unwearying, he rallied the remains of the Spanish forces, and, with the Guerillas, organized a new army, at the head of which, for a year and eight months, he maintained a constant, an obstinate, and unequal struggle with the troops of Napoleon. His glorious courage and undying perseverance gained for him, in 1812, the chief command of the army in Gallicia, about 10,000 strong. This force joined Lord Wellington; but, after active operations ceased, marched back into the province from which it was named, and went into winter-quarters. On the new campaign being opened, he appeared at the head of the brave _Gallegos_, and continued to display the highest military talent against the enemy, until they were driven over the Pyrenees by the British; after which, the battles of Orthes and Toulouse, and the capture of Paris by the allies, by securing the peace of 1814, restored tranquillity to ravaged Europe, and Ferdinand VII. to the throne of Spain.

Strange to say, this event, for which he had struggled so hard, was unfortunate for Lacy, who, in consequence of his known attachment to the constitution of the Cortes, was deprived of all his offices--a base return for his many noble services--and he was coldly permitted to retire in obscurity, with his family, to Vinaroz, in the province of Valencia, where he spent two years in peace, though brooding over his wrongs, and planning means of redress.

In 1816, fatally for himself, he returned to active life; for, since the death of Parlier, and other brave men, who had fallen in attempting to secure to Spain that independence for which they had struggled against France, the eyes of all the Liberalists were turned on Louis Lacy, and in him their hopes reposed.

Having gone to Calvetes, in Catalonia, to drink the mineral waters, it chanced that he met there an old companion in arms, General Milano, and his brother, Don Raphael Milano, with two other Spanish gentlemen, whose political sentiments coincided with his own; and, after several secret meetings, they boldly resolved on re-establishing the Cortes at the point of the sword; for Lacy, relying on the sympathy of several regiments, and the regard they paid to his name and achievements, hoped to make them revolt in his favour, on the 5th April, 1817, and proclaim the Constitution.

Denounced by two traitors, the whole enterprise fell to pieces, and the four projectors failed to save themselves.

Abandoned nearly by all on whom he had relied, the unfortunate Lacy was arrested, with a few faithful friends, and conveyed, under care of a strong guard of soldiers, to a prison at Barcelona, where he was hastily tried by a subservient military commission, and sentenced _to death_--a doom which he heard with a calmness that staggered even the stern and partial judge who pronounced it.

As a rising of the Catalonians in his favour was feared and expected, the officials of the arbitrary Government at Barcelona secretly embarked him on board of a small vessel, at midnight, on the 20th June; and, resolving not to be cheated of their victim, sailed for the island of Majorca; and there he was quite as secretly landed on a solitary part of the coast, and conducted, on the night of the 4th July, to the Castle of Belver, which was garrisoned by a regiment of Neapolitan soldiers.

At four o'clock next morning he was suddenly brought out of the fortress, just as day was breaking, and conducted to the deep fosse before the gates; there he was barbarously shot by a platoon of Italians, pursuant to the orders of those who had conveyed him from Barcelona.

Louis Lacy had already faced death too often to receive it otherwise than with the hereditary courage and coolness which had distinguished him through his eventful life, and he fell with his face to his destroyers.

His body was deposited in the old cathedral church of San Dominic, at Palma, the capital of the island; but there it was exhumed, in 1820, and conveyed, with much religious pomp and solemnity, to Barcelona, and interred near the remains of his uncle, the Captain-General Count Francis Anthony; while the newly-established Cortes, vainly to honour the memory of one who had died for them, named his son _the first grenadier of the Spanish army_.

Thus perished Louis Lacy, in his forty-second year, one who, more even than Riego, had secured, by his patriotism, the Revolution of 1820.

"_Lacy_," says a French writer, "etait doue d'une forte constitution, et d'une ame ardent, energique et genereuse. Habile general, intrepide dans les dangers, _il s'etait distingue par des faits d'armes, et par un patriotisme dignes des Grecs et des Romains_!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 11: This is _not_ the same Irish officer of whom a memoir is given elsewhere.]

[Footnote 12: _Edinburgh Courant_, 7th January, 1761.]

[Footnote 13: Count O'Rourke died at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1785.]

COLONEL WALTER BUTLER,

OF THE IRISH MUSKETEERS.

In the army of Ferdinand II., Emperor of Austria (who succeeded his brother Matthias in 1619), then commanded by Albrecht, Count of Wallenstein and Duke of Friedland, were two brave Irish soldiers of fortune--James Butler, who commanded a regiment of Irish dragoons; and his younger brother, Walter, who was colonel of a regiment of Irish musketeers.

These gentlemen were nearly related to James, then Earl of Ormond, and were driven to seek service in foreign wars by the result of a quarrel between their family and King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England, who had unjustly wrested from the Butlers their valuable estates, and bestowed them upon his Scottish favourite, Sir Richard Preston, Laird of Craigmillar (near Edinburgh), and Knight of the Bath. This gentleman, who was afterwards created Lord Dingwall in the peerage of Scotland, and Earl of Desmond in that of Ireland, 6th June, 1614, claimed Ormond in right of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Butler, who was the only daughter of Thomas, Earl of Ormond, and widow of Theobald, Viscount of Theophelim. Such was the undue partiality of James for his countryman, the Viscount Dingwall, that in 1614, when Sir Walter, eldest son of Sir John Butler, third brother of the old Earl of Ormond, inherited that title, the Ormond estates (which in ancient times were an Irish principality on the left bank of the middle Shannon, in the northern part of Munster) were bestowed upon the stranger; and the king, to enforce his claim, wrote a very peremptory letter to the Irish Privy Council. Sir Arthur Chichester, Baron of Belfast, was at that time Lord Deputy and Chief Governor of Ireland. Finding the Council averse to this injustice, James, who was notorious for entertaining the most absurd ideas of his prerogative, took the matter into his own hands, and, charging the Earl of Ormond with "non-compliance," threw him into the Fleet prison, where he remained for eight years, enduring great want and misery, while all his old hereditary possessions were seized and confiscated, by which his family were reduced and ruined.

Preston, Lord Dingwall, was drowned in June, 1621 when on his way from Dublin to Scotland. He left an only daughter, Lady Elizabeth Preston, through whom his titles and Irish estates went afterwards to the Earls of Ossory.

The trouble in which the family became involved, and the wandering spirit which possessed the Irish, like the Scots of those days, led the earl's two cousins, James and Walter, into the Imperial service, where they soon obtained the command of regiments, and served under John de Tscerclai, the Count Tilly, and the great Wallenstein, in most of the battles of the Thirty Years' War.

In 1631, Walter Butler, with his battalion of Irish musketeers, formed part of the Imperial garrison which defended the town of Frankfort-on-the-Oder against the victorious army of Gustavus Adolphus.

Frankfort was even then a large town, and being capital of the middle mark of Brandenburg, was remarkable for its fairs and university. As it stood only forty-eight miles from Berlin, the imperial generals were anxious about its safety. Hannibal Count de Schomberg, the successor of old Torquato Conti, commanded the garrison, which consisted of ten thousand horse and foot. The town was surrounded by strong ramparts and gates, but was divided in two by the Oder.

At the head of eighteen thousand men, with two hundred pieces of cannon, and a pontoon bridge one hundred and eighty feet long, the warlike King of Sweden marched along the banks of the river, and appeared near the town on the 1st day of April. No troops ever presented a finer aspect than the Swedish, as they marched in several columns to the investment of Frankfort, the attack on which was planned by Sir John Hepburn, of Athelstaneford (afterwards a marechal de camp in France), who then commanded the green brigade of Scots in the service of Gustavus. In the army of the latter were no less than fifteen thousand Scots at this time.

There is an old rhyme, which says--

"He who lyes before Frankfort a year and a daye, Is lord of the empire for ever and aye."

But, knowing well that the fiery King of Sweden would not remain a week if he could help it, Count Schomberg, the commander-in-chief; the Count de Montecuculi, an Italian; Campmaster-General Teiffenbach, and Colonel Herbertstein, made the most vigorous preparations to defend the place; and to _Walter Butler_ and his Irish musketeers assigned a post of the greatest danger.

"Take him in every respect," says the historian of Gustavus, "he was one of the bravest officers in the Emperor's service; but as the Imperialists envied this gallant foreigner, care was taken to place him in _the weakest part_ of the fortification; or, to speak more to the purpose, in a part that scarcely deserved to be called a fortification." In no way either daunted or disheartened, Butler resolved to make the best of it, and ordered his Irishmen to dig a trench and form a breastwork in rear of it; and thus, after incredible labour, they formed a solid rampart in one day; but that evening he went to Count Schomberg, and represented "that the post assigned to him was almost incapable of being defended, and that unless a sally was made that very night, to prevent the Swedes and Scots from coming nearer his indifferent parapet, the place would be taken."

But Schomberg heard him without interest or attention.

"Give me but five troops of cuirassiers, Count Hannibal," said he, "and five of dragoons, and at the peril of life and reputation, I will undertake to make the Swedes raise the siege."