Shake-downs, a temporary cooking apparatus, plenty of tobacco, and a tub to wash in: this is what man requires, and this without difficulty can be got. His Majesty's tastes are simple;simple, and yet good and human. Here is a small Royal Order, which I read once, and ever since remember,--though the reference is now blown away, and lost in those unindexed Sibylline Farragos, the terror of human nature;--let us copy it from memory, till some deliverer arise with finger on page. [Probably in Rodenbeck's Beitrage, --but long sad searching there, and elsewhere, proves unavailing at present. Historical Farragos without INDEX; a hundred, or several hundred, blind sacks of Historical clippings, generally authentic too if useless, and not the least scrap of LABEL on them:--are not these a handy article!]
"At Magdeburg, on this Review-Journey, have dinner for me, under a certain Tree you know of, outside the ramparts." Dinner of one sound portion solid, one ditto liquid, of the due quality; readied honestly,--and to be eaten under a shady Tree; on the Review-ground itself, with the summer sky over one's head.
Could Jupiter Tonans, had he been travelling on business in those parts, have done better with his dinner?--"At Sinzheim?" thinks his Royal Highness; and has spoken privily to the Page Keith. To glide out of their quarters there, in that waste negligent old Town (where post-horses can be had), in the gray of the summer's dawn? Across the Rhine to Speyer is but three hours riding; thence to Landau, into France, into--? Enough, Page Keith has undertaken to get horses, and the flight shall at last be. Husht, husht. To-morrow morning, before the sparrow wake, it is our determination to be upon the road!
Ruins of the Tower of Stauffen, HOHEN or High STAUFFEN, where Kaiser Barbarossa lived once, young and ruddy, and was not yet a MYTH, "winking and nodding under the Hill at Salzburg,"--yes, it is but a few miles to the right there, were this a deliberate touring party. But this is a rapid driving one; knows nothing about Stauffen, cares nothing.--We cannot fancy Friedrich remembered Barbarossa at all; or much regarded Heilbronn itself, the principal and only famous Town they pass this day. The St.
Kilian's Church, your Highness, and big stone giant at the top of the steeple yonder,--adventurous masons and slater people get upon the crown of his head, sometimes, and stand waving flags.
[Buddaus, Lexicon, ii. ? Heilbronn.]
The Townhouse too (RATHHAUS), with its amazing old Clock?
And Gotz von Berlichingen, the Town-Councillors once had him in prison for one night, in the "Gotz's Tower" here; your Highness has heard of "Gotz with the Iron Hand"? Berlichingens still live at Jaxthausen, farther down the Neckar Valley, in these parts;and show the old HAND, considerably rusted now. Heilbronn, the most famous City on the Neckar; and its old miraculous Holy Well--? What cares his Highness! Weinsberg again, which is but a few miles to the right of us,--there it was that the Besieged Wives did that astonishing feat, 600 years ago; coming out, as the capitulation bore, "with their most valuable property," each brought her Husband on her back (were not the fact a little uncertain!)--whereby the old Castle has, to this day, the name "WEIBERTREUE, Faithfulness of Women." Welf's Duchess, Husband on back, was at the head of those women; a Hohenzollern ancestor of yours, I think I have heard, was of the besieging party. [Siege is notorious enough; A.D. 1140: Kohler Reichshistorie, p. 167, who does not mention the story of the women;Menzel (Wolfgang), Geschichte der Deutschen,
p. 287, who takes no notice that it is a highly mythical story,--supported only by the testimony of one poor Monk in Koln, vaguely chronicling fifty years after date and at that good distance.]
Alas, thinks his Royal Highness, is there not a flower of Welfdom now in England; and I, unluckiest of Hohenzollerns, still far away from her here! It is at Windsor, not in Weinsberg, or among the ruins of WEIBERTREUE, that his Highness wishes to be.
At Heilbronn our road branches off to the left; and we roll diligently towards Sinzheim, calculating to be there before nightfall. Whew! Something has gone awry at Sinzheim: no right lodging in the waste Inns there; or good clean Barns, of a promising character, are to be had nearer than there:
we absolutely do not go to Sinzheim to-night; we are to stop at Steinfurth, a small quiet Hamlet with Barns, four or five miles short of that! This was a great disappointment to the Prince,--and some say, a highly momentous circumstance in his History: ["Might perhaps have succeeded at Sinzheim" (Seckendorf's
Relation of the Crown-Prince's meditated Flight,
p. 2;--addressed to Prince Eugene few days afterwards; given in Forster, iii. 1-13).]--however, he rallies in the course of the evening; speaks again to Page Keith. "Steinfurth [STONY-FORD, over the Brook here]; be it at Steinfurth, all the same!" Page Keith will manage to get horses for us here, no less. And Speyer and the Ferry of the Rhine are within three hours. Favor us, Silence and all ye good genii!--On Friday morning, 4th August, 1730, "usual hour of starting, 3 A.M.," not being yet came, the Royal Party lies asleep in two clean airy Barns, facing one another, in the Village of Steinfurth; Barns facing one another, with the Heidelberg Highway and Village Green asleep in front between them; [Compare Wilhelmina, i. 259 (her Account of the Flight: "Heard it from my Brother,"--and report it loosely after a dozen years!).] for it is little after two in the morning, the dawn hardly beginning to break. Prince Friedrich, with his Trio of Vigilance, Buddenbrock, Waldau, Rochow, lies in one Barn; Majesty, with his Seckendorf and party, is in the other: apparently all still locked in sleep?