Volume Three—Chapter Forty Five.

Liberation of the Princes of the Blood-Royal of Shoa.

Humanity to his own subjects must be considered a distinguishing feature in the character of the reigning despot. He is ignorant, but not stupid—to his foes fierce, but not implacable; and although his manifold good qualities are sullied by the part he sustains in the odious traffic in his fellow-men—a moral plague which has by its baneful influence contaminated the whole of this quarter of the globe—he had, on more occasions than one, evinced an unlooked-for readiness to open his eyes to his errors. Possessed of faults inseparable from the absolute semi-barbarian, he had, nevertheless, been found mild, just, clement, and almost patriarchal in his government:—he is a monarch whom experience has proved worthy to reign over a better people, and to be possessed of an understanding and of latent virtues requiring nought save cultivation to place him, in a moral and intellectual point of view, immeasurably in advance of other African potentates.

Whilst indulging in the agreeable conviction that the endeavours of the British Embassy had been successful in arousing a monarch, who exercises so wide an influence over the destinies of surrounding millions, to a sense of the wickedness and degradation attaching in civilised lands to barter in the flesh and blood of our fellow-men, it occurred to me that he might be exhorted, with the best prospect of success, to break through the barbarous precautionary policy under which those members of the royal house who possess a contingent claim to the crown, and in other Christian realms would hold the highest offices and honours within its gift, had, through every generation since the days of the son of David, been doomed to chains in a living grave. And from the fortunate fact of the issue male of the present reign being limited to two, I derived the pleasant hope, that if a statute so jealously guarded during nearly three thousand years, could now for once be infringed, it would not, in all probability, be revived on the monarch’s demise.

Entertaining the liveliest fears of death, his manifold superstitions were ever the most easily awakened during sickness, when the actions of his past life crowded up in judgment before him. It was on these occasions that, in order to quiet his conscience, he made the most liberal votive offerings to the church and to the monastery, and that he gained the greatest victories over his deep-rooted avarice; and it was on these occasions, therefore, that the chord of his latent good feeling might obviously be touched with the happiest result to the cause of humanity.

That singular blending of debauchery and devotion which marks the royal vigils, has seriously impaired a constitution naturally good. During a long succession of years the Psalms of David and the strongest cholera mixture have equally shared the midnight hours of the king; and although scarcely past the meridian of life, he is subject to sudden spasmodic attacks of an alarming character. In one of these his restoration had been despaired of both by the priests and the physicians; and the voice of wailing and lamentation already filled the precincts of the palace.

Scarcely was it light ere a page came to my tent with an urgent summons to the sick chamber. We found the despot pale and emaciated, with fevered lip and bloodshot eye, reclining upon a couch in a dark corner of the closed veranda, his head swathed in white cloth, and his trembling arms supported by bolsters and cushions. Abba Raguel, the dwarf Father Confessor, with eyes swollen from watching, was rocking to and fro, whilst he drowsily scanned an illuminated Ethiopic volume, containing the lives of the martyrs; and in deep conversation with the sick monarch was a favourite monk, habited like an Arab Bedouin in a black goat’s hair cameline and a yellow cowl, but displaying the sacred cross in his right hand. The loud voice of the priesthood arose in boisterous song from the adjacent apartment: strings of red worsted had been tied round the monarch’s thumbs and great toes; and the threshold of the outer chamber was bedewed with the still moist blood of a black bullock, which, when the taper of life was believed to be flickering in the socket, had been thrice led round the royal couch, and, with its head turned towards the East, was then slaughtered at the door, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

“My children,” said His Majesty in a sepulchral voice, as he extended his burning hand towards us—“behold, I am sore stricken. Last night they believed me dead, and the voice of mourning had arisen within the palace walls, but God hath spared me until now. Tell me the medicine for this disease.”

A febrifuge having been prepared, we attempted to follow the etiquette of the Abyssinian court, by tasting the draught prescribed; but the king, again extending his parched hand, protested against this necessity. “What need is there now of this?” he exclaimed reproachfully: “do not I know that you would administer to Sáhela Selássie nothing that could do him mischief? My people are bad; and if God had not mercy on me to restore me, they would deal evil with you—and to strip you of your property would even take away your lives.”

I had oftentimes complimented the king upon the mildness and equity of his rule, and upon the readiness with which he gave ear to intercession on behalf of the slave. The implicit confidence which had supplanted all fear and suspicion in the breast of His Majesty, now favoured a still stronger appeal to his humanity, to his magnanimity, and to his piety. I urged him to take into favourable consideration the abject condition of his royal brothers—victims to a tyrannical and unnatural statute, the legacy of a barbarous age, which for centuries had resulted in such incalculable misery and mischief. I reminded him that it belongs unto those who wield the sceptre to triumph over prejudices; and that by the liberation of many innocent captives, of whom, though possessing the strongest claim that blood can give, he had perhaps scarcely even thought during his long and prosperous reign, he would perform an act alike acceptable to Heaven, and calculated to secure to himself on earth an imperishable name.

“And I will release them,” returned the monarch, after a moment’s debate within himself. “By the holy Eucharist I swear, and by the church of the Holy Trinity in Koora Gádel, that if Sáhela Selássie arise from this bed of sickness, all of whom you speak shall be restored to the enjoyment of liberty.”

The sun was shining brighter than usual, through a cloudless azure sky, when we all received a welcome summons to witness the redemption of this solemn pledge. The balcony of Justice was tricked out in its gala suit; and priests, governors, sycophants, and courtiers, crowded the yard, as the despot, restored to health, in the highest spirits and good humour, took his accustomed seat upon the velvet cushions. The mandate had gone forth for the liberation of his brothers and his blood relatives, and it had been published abroad, that the royal kith and kindred were to pass the residue of their days free and unfettered near the person of the king, instead of in the dark cells of Góncho.

There were not wanting certain sapient sages who gravely shook the head of disapproval at this fresh proof of foreign influence and ascendency, and who could in nowise comprehend how the venerable custom of ages could be thus suddenly violated. The introduction of great guns, and muskets, and rockets, had not been objected to, although, as a matter of course, the spear of their forefathers was esteemed an infinitely superior weapon. Musical clocks and boxes had been listened to and despised, as vastly inferior to the jingling notes of their own vile instruments; and the Gothic cottage, with its painted trellises, its pictures, and its gay curtains, although pronounced entirely unsuited to Abyssinian habits, had been partially forgiven on the grounds of its beauty.

But this last innovation was beyond all understanding; and many a stupid pate was racked in fruitless endeavours to extract consolation in so momentous a difficulty. The more liberal party were loud in their praises of the king and of his generous intentions; and the royal gaze was with the rest strained wistfully towards the wicket, where he should behold once again the child of his mother, whom he had not seen since his accession, and should make the first acquaintance with his uncles, the brothers of his warrior sire, who had been incarcerated ere he himself had seen the light.

Stern traces had been left by the constraint of one-third of a century upon the seven unfortunate descendants of a royal race, who were shortly ushered into the court by the state-gaoler. Leaning heavily on each other’s shoulders, and linked together by chains, bright and shining with the friction of years, the captives shuffled onward with cramped steps, rather as malefactors proceeding to the gallows-tree, than as innocent and abused princes, regaining the natural rights of man. Tottering to the foot of the throne, they fell as they had been instructed by their burly conductor, prostrate on their faces before their more fortunate but despotic relative, whom they had known heretofore only through his connection with their own misfortunes, and whose voice was yet a stranger to their ears.

Rising with difficulty at the bidding of the monarch, they remained standing in front of the balcony, gazing in stupid wonder at the novelties of the scene, with eyes unaccustomed to meet the broad glare of day. At first they were fixed upon the author of their weary captivity, and upon the white men by his side who had been the instruments of its termination—but the dull, leaden gaze soon wandered in search of other objects; and the approach of freedom appeared to be received with the utmost apathy and indifference. Immured since earliest infancy, they were totally insensible to the blessings of liberty. Their feelings and their habits had become those of the fetter and of the dark dungeon. The iron had rusted into their very souls; and, whilst they with difficulty maintained an erect position, pain and withering despondency were indelibly marked in every line of their vacant and care-furrowed features.

In the damp vaults of Góncho, where heavy manacles on the wrists had been linked to the ankles of the prisoners by a chain so short as to admit only of a bent and stooping posture, the weary hours of the princes had for thirty long years been passed in the fabrication of harps and combs; and of these relics of monotonous existence, elaborately carved in wood and ivory, a large offering was now timidly presented to the king. The first glimpse of his wretched relatives had already dissipated a slight shade of mistrust which had hitherto clouded the royal brow. Nothing that might endanger the security of his reign could be traced in the crippled frames and blighted faculties of the seven miserable objects that cowered before him; and, after directing their chains to be unriveted, he announced to all that they were Free, and to pass the residue of their existence near his own person. Again the joke and the merry laugh passed quickly in the balcony—the court fool resumed his wonted avocations; and, as the monarch himself struck the chords of the gaily-ornamented harp presented by his bloated brother Amnon, the buffoon burst into a high and deserved panegyric upon the royal mercy and generosity.

“My children,” exclaimed His Majesty, turning towards ourselves, after the completion of this tardy act of justice to those whose only crime was their consanguinity to himself—an act to which he had been prompted less by superstition than by a desire to rescue his own offspring from a dungeon, and to secure a high place in the opinion of the civilised world—“My children, you will write all that you have now seen to your country, and will say to the British Queen, that, although far behind the nations of the white men, from whom Ethiopia first received her religion, there yet remains a spark of Christian love in the breast of the king of Shoa.”

The End