Chapter D: D.’s idea of the interpretation of this is that, for the sake of the

law-abiding people (the Torah and Torees), the King’s blood cries for vengeance against the Saturnian Roundheads. The intoxicated people shall plunge into a new course of wickedness, and will then march against the Highlanders. He considers that this was fulfilled in 1650, when, after the capitulation, as he calls it, with the Scotch at Breda, Charles II. landed in Scotland on June 23, and joined the royal army, consisting mainly of Highlanders. About the same moment Cromwell reached London from Ireland, and General Fairfax retired from the army. Cromwell, at this critical moment, jumps into his post, and, on June 29, heads the Parliamentary army against the Scots.

Without at all insisting upon the accuracy of this interpretation, I think it furnishes sufficient of curiosity to make it worthy of insertion. What follows, touching the Tories, I give in his own words:

“Some people stick to the Church of _England_ discipline, even to a superstition, and to their last breath. These people had the nickname of _Tories_, cast on them by the Cromwellites; which is as much as to say some have the law of the Church put upon them, from the Hebrew _Torah_, which signifies the _law_, or the _law of the Church of God_. Perhaps did Cromwell himself, or some of his confident advocates and ministers, designedly invent that cursed name; as it is likely from what happened in the year 1651, when the Parliament ordered the law-books to be translated out of _Latin_ into _English_, wherein the lawyers took a great deal of freedom by using the _verbalia passiva_ very frequently, and almost on all occasions, according to their own fancy and pleasure. As, for instance, Apellans and Apellatus, they made an _Apealer_ and an _Apealee_; the _Arrestans_ and _Arrestatus_, the _Challenger_ and the _Challengee_, as likewise the _Warranter_ and the _Warrantee_; the _Voucher_ and the _Vouchee_; the _Leaser_ and the _Leasee_; in which manner they used likewise the terms of _Torer_ and _Toree_; a _Torer_, in the first place—that is, a promoter of the Common Prayer and Church of England service; and an imposer of human traditions, instead of God’s law; and, in the second place, a _Toree_; that is, one that submits and suffereth such laws to be imposed upon him. Which _nomina verbalia passiva_, so much in vogue amongst the English lawyers, are not at all English but mere French, and the _Participium Passivum_ itself; and more proper to the neat _French_ than the corrupted _Provincial Dialect_; which last our Nostradamus very often mixes with his style; wherein they commonly used to say, _Les confirmads_, _les restads_, _les escilads_, instead of _les confirmez_, _les restez_, _les exilez_, etc. And according to this _Dialect_ one must say, LES TORADS, instead of LES TOREZ, and thus does our Poet.”

If what he says above has any value, the _Toree_ would be the prelates and clergy; the _Torads_ the laity, who adhere to the Church of England and its discipline and ritual. This in the context would have a greater appropriateness than D. D. himself seems to be aware of, for the word it is contrasted with in the context is _les Saturnins_. This word in Nostradamus is constantly used for pagans, in contradistinction to _Albanins_, Christians, robed in white _albus_. In this quatrain also the men of Albany, if we take them for Scotch, are fighting on the side of Church and State against the Roundheads. _Saturne_ is often put for Antichrist by Nostradamus.

The French of this quatrain, as it stands, does not appear to be correct. The first two lines require a verb understood to connect them: “The blood of the king [cries] for vengeance,” etc. The third line has an embarrassed construction: “They will plunge the _Menade_ into a new lake.” If _Saturnins_, again repeated, be understood, it is difficult to see what plunging their mad priestess into the lake can effect. If it could be read as _les Menades_, then the frantic Bacchantes would plunge into a fresh sea of evil or troubles, and, in their wild intoxication, march northwards. If we could put any interpretation upon _Taurer_ that would be applicable to the rendering, the whole quatrain might then apply to the French Revolution, and not the English. I think that the _sang du Juste_ furnishes thus much of certainty as to the interpretation. It must relate to one of two periods; the death of Charles I. or Louis XVI. Then it would be that the Revolutionists, finding the Royalists to be seeking revenge, declared against the Church, and plunged madly into a new order of things. The _Menade_ would be more appropriate to that period than to the earlier one. Bad as they were in England, there was more of lust, infidelity, and blood, corruption, vice, and madness, in France.

Menade. The μαινάδες were Bacchantes, the priestesses who celebrated the festivals of Bacchus. Stephanus says that it is to be explained not only as Bacchic, but as frantic; and this is unquestionably the meaning here. The Greek word appears to be connected with the Sanscrit _man_, to think; and thence the word _manyu_, anger, is said to be derived. They used to run dishevelled, half-naked, and, brandishing the thyrsus; in their fury they would kill and behead men whom they encountered by the way, and carry off their heads, leaping with rage and joy. According to Nonnus, they were virgins so careful of their chastity that they slept with a cincture of serpents. Juvenal attributes no great severity of virtue to them, but their pretensions to such superlative purism renders them all the fitter emblem of the canting Puritans who won Cromwell’s battles for him. In Le Pelletier’s Glossary _maynade_ is given as a Romance word for “a child of four or five years;” but this throws no additional light on our difficulty.

THE BATTLE OF DUNBAR (SEPTEMBER 3, 1650).

_Century VIII.—Quatrain 56._

La bande foible la terre[202] occupera,
Ceux du haut lieu feront horribles cris:
Le gros trouppeau d’estre coin troublera,
Tombe pres Dinebro descouvers les escrits.

_Translation._

The weak band shall occupy the knoll (or, if preferred, it
can be, occupy the ground or field [after the battle]). The
Highlanders (_Ceux du haut lieu_) shall raise horrible shouts
(before they engage, and also after their defeat). The large
force shall be hampered or cornered (_d’estre en coin_), and
fall close to Edinburgh, their papers even falling into the
victor’s hands.

This is a very important forecast indeed. The little band on the knoll—for I prefer that reading—is clearly enough Cromwell’s small force, very much in the condition he describes it to be in, in his letter to Haslerig at Newcastle, September 2, 1650 (Carlyle’s “Cromwell Letters,” ii. 201):

“We are upon an engagement very difficult. The enemy hath
blocked up our way at the Pass at Copperspath, through which we
cannot get without almost a miracle.”

Before sunrise Lesley sends down on Monday his horse to cross the small Brocksburn. Whoso wishes to attack must first cross this little brook, in its deep _ditch_, as they then called it (the picturesque tourist would now say _glen_), forty feet deep. Lesley’s army comes out and places itself in “rather narrow ground,” says Carlyle (p. 202) in 1846; _d’estre en coin_, says Nostradamus in 1558; or 1546, if you like to have it so, for it was probably on paper a clean three hundred years before Carlyle commented; you may even translate him, “takes the trouble to put itself into a corner.” “Hampered in narrow, sloping ground,” says Carlyle again (p. 206).

The reader who wishes for it can here leave off to peruse Carlyle’s very celebrated prose lyric, as they call it, about this “Dunbar Battle,” with its “moon” that “gleams out, hard and _blue_, riding among hail-clouds;” whatever “a blue moon” may mean, or not mean. Carlyle makes Nol there, as the level sun shoots up over St. Abb’s Head and across the sea, quote the sixty-eighth Psalm, in Rous’s doggerel:

“Let God arise, and scattered
Let all His enemies be;
And let all those that do Him hate
Before His presence flee!”

Observe here that it is the _Saturnins_, in a frenzy of antichrist, who do this, according to Nostradamus. But you can take which side you please. “The Lord General made a halt,” says Hodgson, “and sang the hundred-and-seventeenth Psalm” at the foot of Doon Hill; to the tune of Bangor or other, says Carlyle, “strong and great against the sky,” this grand strain arises, in which the metre, like the Lord General himself, makes a halt too:

“O give ye praise unto the Lord,
All _nations_ that be;
Likewise ye people all, accord
His name to magnify”—

which, to eke out the measure, has to be read, _nay-shy-ons_, and, for the rhyme’s sake, _magnifee_. This energy is really not dramatic, but it _is_ stagey; on the border-land of sublimity, it curls the lip of humour to a smile.

The poor Highlanders taken prisoners were sold, “not,” says Cotton, “to perpetual servitude, but for six, or seven, or eight years, as we do our own” (blessed are they who are of the household of faith); “which is really a mild arrangement,” in the estimation of “the Sage of Chelsea” (p. 358).

But now back to our exegesis let us go. Cromwell captured, on this occasion, the whole of the papers of the Scotch War Office, as well as the Great Seal of Scotland, which he sent forward as a trophy to London. Cromwell’s letter to Speaker Lenthall excuses his making “no more frequent address to Parliament,” but “it hath now pleased God to bestow a mercy upon you worthy of your knowledge;” and so he goes on, for a space occupying eight closely printed pages 8vo. He says he wishes to treat the Scotch very kindly, for that “God hath a people here fearing his name, though deceived;” and he concludes, in the dirty language of the godly of his century, that he has “offered much love unto such, in the bowels of Christ.” His bowels, to the Highlanders made prisoner, awarded slavery, not _perpetual_, but for eight years only. Here are tender mercies and bowels commiserate for contemplation! sufficient, as we have seen, to make Nostradamus shudder at their approach.

Son temps s’approche si près que je souspire (viii. 76, p. 177).

All that was done here, however, could not prevent Charles from being crowned on January 1, 1654, at Scone, in Scotland. In the next summer he penetrated into England, and was pursued by Cromwell and his Ironsides.

D. D. follows up the Quatrain 56, which we have just treated, with Century VIII., Quatrain 57, which stands next to it:

De Soldat simple parviendra en Empire. [II. 171.]