HISTORIC ODDITIES

AND
STRANGE EVENTS

By the same Author.

METHUEN & CO.

Historic Oddities

AND

STRANGE EVENTS

BY

S. BARING GOULD, M.A.

AUTHOR OF "MEHALAH," "JOHN HERRING," ETC.

FIRST SERIES

LONDON
METHUEN & CO.
18 BURY STREET, W.C.
1889

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

A reader of history in its various epochs in different countries, comes upon eccentric individuals and extraordinary events, lightly passed over, may be, as not materially affecting the continuity of history, as not producing any seriously disturbing effect on its course. Such persons, such events have always awakened interest in myself, and when I have come on them, it has been my pleasure to obtain such details concerning them as were available, and which would be out of place in a general history as encumbering it with matter that is unimportant, or of insufficient importance to occupy much space. Two of the narratives contained in this work have appeared already in the "Cornhill Magazine," but I have considerably enlarged them by the addition of fresh material; some of the others came out in the "Gentleman's Magazine," and one in "Belgravia." With only two of them—"Peter Nielsen" and "A Wax and Honey-Moon"—are the authorities somewhat gone beyond and the facts slightly dressed to assume the shape of stories.

S. Baring Gould.

Lew Trenchard, N. Devon,
 July, 1889.

HISTORIC ODDITIES.

The Disappearance of Bathurst.

The mystery of the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst on November 25, 1809, is one which can never with certainty be cleared up. At the time public opinion in England was convinced that he had been secretly murdered by order of Napoleon, and the "Times" in a leader on January 23, 1810, so decisively asserted this, that the "Moniteur" of January 29 ensuing, in sharp and indignant terms repudiated the charge. Nevertheless, not in England only, but in Germany, was the impression so strong that Napoleon had ordered the murder, if murder had been committed, that the Emperor saw fit, in the spring of the same year, solemnly to assure the wife of the vanished man, on his word of honour, that he knew nothing about the disappearance of her husband. Thirty years later Varnhagen von Ense, a well-known German author, reproduced the story and reiterated the accusation against Napoleon, or at all events against the French. Later still, the "Spectator," in an article in 1862, gave a brief sketch of the disappearance of Bathurst, and again repeated the charge against French police agents or