Part 4

After the peace of Campo Formio (1797) there was some hope that the Rhenish provinces would be constituted into an independent republic. In 1799 the provinces sent an embassy, of which Gorres was a member, to Paris to put their case before the directory. The embassy reached Paris on the 20th of November 1799; two days before this Napoleon had assumed the supreme direction of affairs. After much delay the embassy was received by him; but the only answer they obtained was "that they might rely on perfect justice, and that the French government would never lose sight of their wants." Gorres on his return published a tract called _Resultate meiner Sendung nach Paris_, in which he reviewed the history of the French Revolution. During the thirteen years of Napoleon's dominion Gorres lived a retired life, devoting himself chiefly to art or science. In 1801 he married Catherine de Lasaulx, and was for some years teacher at a secondary school in Coblenz; in 1806 he moved to Heidelberg, where he lectured at the university. As a leading member of the Heidelberg Romantic group, he edited together with K. Brentano and L. von Arnim the famous _Zeitung fur Einsiedler_ (subsequently re-named _Trost-Einsamkeit_), and in 1807 he published _Die teutschen Volksbucher_. He returned to Coblenz in 1808, and again found occupation as a teacher in a secondary school, supported by civic funds. He now studied Persian, and in two years published a _Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt_, which was followed ten years later by _Das Heldenbuch von Iran_, a translation of part of the _Shahnama_, the epic of Firdousi. In 1813 he actively took up the cause of national independence, and in the following year founded _Der rheinische Merkur_. The intense earnestness of the paper, the bold outspokenness of its hostility to Napoleon, and its fiery eloquence secured for it almost instantly a position and influence unique in the history of German newspapers. Napoleon himself called it _la cinquieme puissance_. The ideal it insisted on was a united Germany, with a representative government, but under an emperor after the fashion of other days,--for Gorres now abandoned his early advocacy of republicanism. When Napoleon was at Elba, Gorres wrote an imaginary proclamation issued by him to the people, the intense irony of which was so well veiled that many Frenchmen mistook it for an original utterance of the emperor. He inveighed bitterly against the second peace of Paris (1815), declaring that Alsace and Lorraine should have been demanded back from France.

Stein was glad enough to use the _Merkur_ at the time of the meeting of the congress of Vienna as a vehicle for giving expression to his hopes. But Hardenberg, in May 1815, warned Gorres to remember that he was not to arouse hostility against France, but only against Bonaparte. There was also in the _Merkur_ an antipathy to Prussia, a continual expression of the desire that an Austrian prince should assume the imperial title, and also a tendency to pronounced liberalism--all of which made it most distasteful to Hardenberg, and to his master King Frederick William III. Gorres disregarded warnings sent to him by the censorship and continued the paper in all its fierceness. Accordingly it was suppressed early in 1816, at the instance of the Prussian government; and soon after Gorres was dismissed from his post as teacher at Coblenz. From this time his writings were his sole means of support, and he became a most diligent political pamphleteer. In the wild excitement which followed Kotzebue's assassination, the reactionary decrees of Carlsbad were framed, and these were the subject of Gorres's celebrated pamphlet _Teutschland und die Revolution_ (1820). In this work he reviewed the circumstances which had led to the murder of Kotzebue, and, while expressing all possible horror at the deed itself, he urged that it was impossible and undesirable to repress the free utterance of public opinion by reactionary measures. The success of the work was very marked, despite its ponderous style. It was suppressed by the Prussian government, and orders were issued for the arrest of Gorres and the seizure of his papers. He escaped to Strassburg, and thence went to Switzerland. Two more political tracts, _Europa und die Revolution_ (1821) and _In Sachen der Rheinprovinzen und in eigener Angelegenheit_ (1822), also deserve mention.

In Gorres's pamphlet _Die heilige Allianz und die Volker auf dem Kongress zu Verona_ he asserted that the princes had met together to crush the liberties of the people, and that the people must look elsewhere for help. The "elsewhere" was to Rome; and from this time Gorres became a vehement Ultramontane writer. He was summoned to Munich by King Ludwig of Bavaria as Professor of History in the university, and there his writing enjoyed very great popularity. His _Christliche Mystik_ (1836-1842) gave a series of biographies of the saints, together with an exposition of Roman Catholic mysticism. But his most celebrated ultramontane work was a polemical one. Its occasion was the deposition and imprisonment by the Prussian government of the archbishop Clement Wenceslaus, in consequence of the refusal of that prelate to sanction in certain instances the marriages of Protestants and Roman Catholics. Gorres in his _Athanasius_ (1837) fiercely upheld the power of the church, although the liberals of later date who have claimed Gorres as one of their own school deny that he ever insisted on the absolute supremacy of Rome. _Athanasius_ went through several editions, and originated a long and bitter controversy. In the _Historisch-politische Blatter_, a Munich journal, Gorres and his son Guido (1805-1852) continually upheld the claims of the church. Gorres received from the king the order of merit for his services. He died on the 29th of January 1848.

Gorres's _Gesammelte Schriften_ (only his political writings) appeared in six volumes (1854-1860), to which three volumes of _Gesammelte Briefe_ were subsequently added (1858-1874). Cp. J. Galland, _Joseph von Gorres_ (1876, 2nd ed. 1877); J. N. Sepp, _Gorres und seine Zeitgenossen_ (1877), and by the same author, _Gorres_, in the series _Geisteshelden_ (1896). A _Gorres-Gesellschaft_ was founded in 1876.

GORSAS, ANTOINE JOSEPH (1752-1793), French publicist and politician, was born at Limoges (Haute-Vienne) on the 24th of March 1752, the son of a shoemaker. He established himself as a private tutor in Paris, and presently set up a school for the army at Versailles, which was attended by commoners as well as nobles. In 1781 he was imprisoned for a short time in the Bicetre on an accusation of corrupting the morals of his pupils, his real offence being the writing of satirical verse. These circumstances explain the violence of his anti-monarchical sentiment. At the opening of the states-general he began to publish the _Courrier de Versailles a Paris et de Paris a Versailles_, in which appeared on the 4th of October 1789 the account of the banquet of the royal bodyguard. Gorsas is said to have himself read it in public at the Palais Royal, and to have headed one of the columns that marched on Versailles. He then changed the name of his paper to the _Courrier des quatre-vingt-trois departements_, continuing his incendiary propaganda, which had no small share in provoking the popular insurrections of June and August 1792. During the September massacres he wrote in his paper that the prisons were the centre of an anti-national conspiracy and that the people exercised a just vengeance on the guilty. On the 10th of September 1792 he was elected to the Convention for the department of Seine-et-Oise, and on the 10th of January 1793 was elected one of its secretaries. He sat at first with the Mountain, but having been long associated with Roland and Brissot, his agreement with the Girondists became gradually more pronounced; during the trial of Louis XVI. he dissociated himself more and more from the principles of the Mountain, and he voted for the king's detention during the war and subsequent banishment. A violent attack on Marat in the _Courrier_ led to an armed raid on his printing establishment on the 9th of March 1793. The place was sacked, but Gorsas escaped the popular fury by flight. The facts being reported to the Convention, little sympathy was shown to Gorsas, and a resolution (which was evaded) was passed forbidding representatives to occupy themselves with journalism. On the 2nd of June he was ordered by the Convention to hold himself under arrest with other members of his party. He escaped to Normandy to join Buzot, and after the defeat of the Girondists at Pacy-sur-Eure he found shelter in Brittany. He was imprudent enough to return to Paris in the autumn, where he was arrested on the 6th of October and guillotined the next day.

See the _Moniteur_, No. 268 (1792), Nos. 20, 70 new series 18 (1793); M. Tourneux, _Bibl. de l'hist. de Paris_, 10,291 seq. (1894).

GORST, SIR JOHN ELDON (1835- ). English statesman, was born at Preston in 1835, the son of Edward Chaddock Gorst, who took the name of Lowndes on succeeding to the family estate in 1853. He graduated third wrangler from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1857, and was admitted to a fellowship. After beginning to read for the bar in London, his father's illness and death led to his sailing to New Zealand, where he married in 1860 Mary Elizabeth Moore. The Maoris had at that time set up a king of their own in the Waikato district and Gorst, who had made friends with the chief Tamihana (William Thomson), acted as an intermediary between the Maoris and the government. Sir George Grey made him inspector of schools, then resident magistrate, and eventually civil commissioner in Upper Waikato. Tamihana's influence secured his safety in the Maori outbreak of 1863. In 1908 he published a volume of recollections, under the title of _New Zealand Revisited: Recollections of the Days of my Youth_. He then returned to England and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1865, becoming Q.C. in 1875. He stood unsuccessfully for Hastings in the Conservative interest in 1865, and next year entered parliament as member for the borough of Cambridge, but failed to secure re-election at the dissolution of 1868. After the Conservative defeat of that year he was entrusted by Disraeli with the reorganization of the party machinery, and in five years of hard work he paved the way for the Conservative success at the general election of 1874. At a bye-election in 1875 he re-entered parliament as member for Chatham, which he continued to represent until 1892. He joined Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr Arthur Balfour in the "Fourth Party," and he became solicitor-general in the administration of 1885-1886 and was knighted. On the formation of the second Salisbury administration (1886) he became under-secretary for India and in 1891 financial secretary to the Treasury. At the general election of 1892 he became member for Cambridge University. He was deputy chairman of committees in the House of Commons from 1888 to 1891, and on the formation of the third Salisbury administration in 1895 he became vice-president of the committee of the council on education (until 1902). Sir John Gorst adhered to the principles of Tory democracy which he had advocated in the days of the fourth party, and continued to exhibit an active interest in the housing of the poor, the education and care of their children, and in social questions generally, both in parliament and in the press. But he was always exceedingly "independent" in his political action. He objected to Mr Chamberlain's proposals for tariff reform, and lost his seat at Cambridge at the general election of 1906 to a tariff reformer. He then withdrew from the vice-chancellorship of the Primrose League, of which he had been one of the founders, on the ground that it no longer represented the policy of Lord Beaconsfield. In 1910 he contested Preston as a Liberal, but failed to secure election.

His elder son, SIR J. ELDON GORST (b. 1861), was financial adviser to the Egyptian government from 1898 to 1904, when he became assistant under-secretary of state for foreign affairs. In 1907 he succeeded Lord Cromer as British agent and consul-general in Egypt.

An account of Sir John Gorst's connexion with Lord Randolph Churchill will be found in the _Fourth Party_ (1906), by his younger son, Harold E. Gorst.

GORTON, SAMUEL (c. 1600-1677), English sectary and founder of the American sect of Gortonites, was born about 1600 at Gorton, Lancashire. He was first apprenticed to a clothier in London, but, fearing persecution for his religious convictions, he sailed for Boston, Massachusetts, in 1636. Constantly involved in religious disputes, he fled in turn to Plymouth, and (in 1637-1638) to Aquidneck (Newport), where he was publicly whipped for insulting the clergy and magistrates. In 1643 he bought land from the Narraganset Indians at Shawomet--now Warwick--where he was joined by a number of his followers; but he quarrelled with the Indians and the authorities at Boston sent soldiers to arrest Gorton and six of his companions. He served a term of imprisonment for heresy at Charlestown, after which he was ejected from the colony. In England in 1646 he published the curious tract "Simplicities Defence against Seven Headed Policy" (reprinted in 1835), giving an account of his grievances against the Massachusetts government. In 1648 he returned to New England with a letter of protection from the earl of Warwick, and joining his former companions at Shawomet, which he named Warwick, in honour of the earl, he remained there till his death at the end of 1677. He is chiefly remembered as the founder of a small sect called the Gortonites, which survived till the end of the 18th century. They had a great contempt for the regular clergy and for all outward forms of religion, holding that the true believers partook of the perfection of God.

Among his quaint writings are: _An Incorruptible Key composed of the CX. Psalms wherewith you may open the rest of the Scriptures_ (1647), and _Saltmarsh returned from the Dead_, with its sequel, _An Antidote against the Common Plague of the World_ (1657). See L. G. Jones, _Samuel Gorton: a forgotten Founder of our Liberties_ (Providence, 1896).

GORTON, an urban district in the Gorton parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, forming an eastern suburb of Manchester. Pop. (1901) 26,564. It is largely a manufacturing district, having cotton mills and iron, engineering and chemical works.

GORTYNA, or GORTYN, an important ancient city on the southern side of the island of Crete. It stood on the banks of the small river Lethaeus (Mitropolipotamo), about three hours distant from the sea, with which it communicated by means of its two harbours, Metallum and Lebena. It had temples of Apollo Pythius, Artemis and Zeus. Near the town was the famous fountain of Sauros, inclosed by fruit-bearing poplars; and not far from this was another spring, overhung by an evergreen plane tree which in popular belief marked the scene of the amours of Zeus and Europa. Gortyna was, next to Cnossus, the largest and most powerful city of Crete. The two cities combined to subdue the rest of the island; but when they had gained their object they quarrelled with each other, and the history of both towns is from this time little more than a record of their feuds. Neither plays a conspicuous part in the history of Greece. Under the Romans Gortyna became the metropolis of the island. Extensive ruins may still be seen at the modern village of Hagii Deka, and here was discovered the great inscription containing chapters of its ancient laws. Though partly ruinous, the church of St Titus is a very interesting monument of early Christian architecture, dating from about the 4th century.

See also CRETE, and for a full account of the laws see GREEK LAW.

GORTZ, GEORG HEINRICH VON, BARON VON SCHLITZ (1668-1719), Holstein statesman, was educated at Jena. He entered the Holstein-Gottorp service, and after the death of the duchess Hedwig Sophia, Charles XII.'s sister, became very influential during the minority of her son Duke Charles Frederick. His earlier policy aimed at strengthening Holstein-Gottorp at the expense of Denmark. With this object, during Charles XII.'s stay at Altranstadt (1706-1707), he tried to divert the king's attention to the Holstein question, and six years later, when the Swedish commander, Magnus Stenbock, crossed the Elbe, Gortz rendered him as much assistance as was compatible with not openly breaking with Denmark, even going so far as to surrender the fortress of Tonning to the Swedes. Gortz next attempted to undermine the grand alliance against Sweden by negotiating with Russia, Prussia and Saxony for the purpose of isolating Denmark, or even of turning the arms of the allies against her, a task by no means impossible in view of the strained relations between Denmark and the tsar. The plan foundered, however, on the refusal of Charles XII. to save the rest of his German domains by ceding Stettin to Prussia. Another simultaneous plan of procuring the Swedish crown for Duke Charles Frederick also came to nought. Gortz first suggested the marriage between the duke of Holstein and the tsarevna Anne of Russia, and negotiations were begun in St Petersburg with that object. On the arrival of Charles XII. from Turkey at Stralsund, Gortz was the first to visit him, and emerged from his presence chief minister or "grand-vizier" as the Swedes preferred to call the bold and crafty satrap, whose absolute devotion to the Swedish king took no account of the intense wretchedness of the Swedish nation. Gortz, himself a man of uncommon audacity, seems to have been fascinated by the heroic element in Charles's nature and was determined, if possible, to save him from his difficulties. He owed his extraordinary influence to the fact that he was the only one of Charles's advisers who believed, or pretended to believe, that Sweden was still far from exhaustion, or at any rate had a sufficient reserve of power to give support to an energetic diplomacy--Charles's own opinion, in fact. Gortz's position, however, was highly peculiar. Ostensibly, he was only the Holstein minister at Charles's court, in reality he was everything in Sweden except a Swedish subject--finance minister, plenipotentiary to foreign powers, factotum, and responsible to the king alone, though he had not a line of instructions. But he was just the man for a hero in extremities, and his whole course of procedure was, of necessity, revolutionary. His chief financial expedient was to debase, or rather ruin, the currency by issuing copper tokens redeemable in better times; but it was no fault of his that Charles XII., during his absence, flung upon the market too enormous an amount of this copper money for Gortz to deal with. By the end of 1718 it seemed as if Gortz's system could not go on much longer, and the hatred of the Swedes towards him was so intense and universal that they blamed him for Charles XII.'s tyranny as well as for his own. Gortz hoped, however, to conclude peace with at least some of Sweden's numerous enemies before the crash came and then, by means of fresh combinations, to restore Sweden to her rank as a great power. It must be admitted that, in pursuance of his "system," Gortz displayed a genius for diplomacy which would have done honour to a Metternich or a Talleyrand. He desired peace with Russia first of all, and at the congress of Aland even obtained relatively favourable terms, only to have them rejected by his obstinately optimistic master. Simultaneously, Gortz was negotiating with Cardinal Alberoni and with the whigs in England; but all his ingenious combinations collapsed like a house of cards on the sudden death of Charles XII. The whole fury of the Swedish nation instantly fell upon Gortz. After a trial before a special commission which was a parody of justice--the accused was not permitted to have any legal assistance or the use of writing materials--he was condemned to decapitation and promptly executed. Perhaps Gortz deserved his fate for "unnecessarily making himself the tool of an unheard-of despotism," but his death was certainly a judicial murder, and some historians even regard him as a political martyr.

See R. N. Bain, _Charles XII._ (London, 1895), and _Scandinavia_, chap. 12 (Cambridge, 1905); B. von Beskow, _Freherre Georg Heinrich von Gortz_ (Stockholm, 1868). (R. N. B.)

GORZ (Ital. _Gorizia_; Slovene, _Gorica_), the capital of the Austrian crownland of Gorz and Gradisca, about 390 m. S.W. of Vienna by rail. Pop (1900) 25,432, two-thirds Italians, the remainder mostly Slovenes and Germans. It is picturesquely situated on the left bank of the Isonzo in a fertile valley, 35 m. N.N.W. of Trieste by rail. It is the seat of an archbishop and possesses an interesting cathedral, built in the 14th century and the richly decorated church of St Ignatius, built in the 17th century by the Jesuits. On an eminence, which dominates the town, is situated the old castle, formerly the seat of the counts of Gorz, now partly used as barracks. Owing to the mildness of its climate Gorz has become a favourite winter-resort, and has received the name of the Nice of Austria. Its mean annual temperature is 55 deg. F.; while the mean winter temperature is 38.7 deg. F. It is adorned with several pretty gardens with a luxuriant southern vegetation. On a height to the N. of the town is situated the Franciscan convent of Castagnavizza, in whose chapel lie the remains of Charles X. of France (d. 1836), the last Bourbon king, of the duke of Angouleme (d. 1844), his son, and of the duke of Chambord (d. 1883). Seven miles to the north of Gorz is the Monte Santo (2275 ft.), a much-frequented place on which stands a pilgrimage church. The industries include cotton and silk weaving, sugar refining, brewing, the manufacture of leather and the making of rosoglio. There is also a considerable trade in wooden work, vegetables, early fruit and wine. Gorz is mentioned for the first time at the beginning of the 11th century, and received its charter as a town in 1307. During the middle ages the greater part of its population was German.